Open Letter To Indian Air Force By A Defence Aspirant Who Travelled 150 KM To Write AFCAT

Respected Madam/Sir, Today while I went to write the AFCAT Exam. I brought to the attention of the Air Force Officers present in my venue that since there were two-time slots for the exam, one at 9AM-11AM and the other from 1PM – 3PM, there was a high probability that the papers could be leaked once the students from the morning batch are done with their exams. The officers informed me that the question papers would be different and I need not worry about such things and should just keep shut and mind my own business.

But to my utter disbelief, dismay, and shock the exact same paper was given for the afternoon session. I just don’t know what to say or how to feel about this. How could this kind of gross mismanagement happen on part of the Indian Air Force? Are the organizers so stupid that they could not understand this huge existing lacunae?

They allowed the students to take their question papers with them after the exam; considering the scenario when a student came out of their exam hall at 11AM and sent pictures of the question paper to their friends in other centers, giving a good two hour window for the paper leakage to happen. And I am not just describing a hypothetical situation here, this has happened in several places and obviously students will do such things if given an opportunity. It is the responsibility of the organizers to make sure that the system is fool-proof. This would have never happened in case of UPSC. Please look into the matter. This is of serious concern since thousands of students write this exam and it would bring havoc on their results.

Please take measures immediately to solve this problem. Either you could conduct a re-exam for the Afternoon batch of students, which would be logistically favourable or conduct re-exam for both the batches (which would entail huge costs). But please don’t repeat this kind of a mistake ever again in the future. Have different question papers for different sessions if you want to conduct the exam in sessions. And by different papers I don’t mean different series with just the order of the questions being changed. Have different questions. Ideally, just let UPSC handle the written exams, anyways writing multiple tests is fatiguing for students. But that’s completely your call, if you are able to conduct impeccable examinations with strict quality standards then it is absolutely fine.
I traveled close to 150KM for this exam and this kind of gross mismanagement is not something I expected.