CAT might be conducted on Open Source software

Bangalore: After the unsuccessful attempt by Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) to hold CAT online, IIM officials are now considering shifting to Linux based Open Source software Foss. Around 20,000 students were impacted by virus attacks while giving the online exam, thus forcing the officials to seriously reconsider the whole situation. The idea of going for Open Source software (free) would be much easier and cheaper for the officials rather than going in for proprietary software.

"Online exams can be easily conducted using Foss as it can not only reduce costs by over 50 percent, but it is also safe against virus and malware attacks," said one of the IIM officials to Economic Times. Experts like T Vignesh Prabhu, a hacker at 'deeprootlinux', which is dedicated to developing and supporting Foss, said virus attacks form the major concern of IIMs. "The only solution is to discard the virus-prone operating system you have been using and install Foss, such as GNU (free software) and Linux-based operating systems," he said.

IIMs had given U.S. based firm Prometric a $40 million contract for arranging the online exams. Despite installing several security measures, they were unable to prevent the virus attacks. Officials at Prometric, which had used proprietary software this time, said many centres were affected by mainly two viruses - Conflicker and W32.NIMDA. IIM officials said this happened despite the fire-walls systems installed. They said the CAT computers were sourced and leased from local colleges in the cities where the examinations were held. They said most of the CAT computers got infected through the servers and other computers in various colleges through the local area network.

Foss software, which grants users the right to study, change, and improve its design through its source code, is the most preferred option. Prabhu said there is enough statistics to prove that GNU/Linux-based operating systems are less prone to virus attacks. The only other way is to keep fighting the viruses by installing the latest updates of various anti-virus software. "And, you have to keep your fingers crossed hoping that developers of anti-virus companies are just as fast as the virus-writers," he added.

The Foss model is already working successfully in states like Kerala, where the state government's IT@School provides IT-enabled education to 1.6 million students a year in the state using Foss. "We will use Foss to handle over four lakh admission application forms in a period of 10-15 days for two lakh 11th standard seats in government and government-aided institutions," said IT@School Executive Director K Anvar Sadath. He said the CAT exam can be run successfully on Foss without any virus threats.

Despite all these advantages, some IIM officials also said it will be difficult to conduct exams like CAT on Foss as it is not user-friendly and there is very less awareness about it. But on the other hand many experts view Windows as too prone to computer viruses and hacking.