The trading of questions of a banking job test after leaking those from a private university by a syndicate astonishingly shows not only the poor morals of job aspirants, mostly university graduates, but also the incompetence of the organisers of the test. The question paper of last Saturday’s recruitment test for hiring 1,511 cash officers in five state-owned banks was leaked from the Ahsanullah University of Science and Technology (AUST), which was tasked with preparing the same. An ICT technician of the private university leaked the paper and handed it to a syndicate, which later sold it to thousands of job seekers. Ahead of the test, the syndicate members set up 11 temporary booths at different points in Dhaka to give the question paper to “clients” who memorised the answers there.
The syndicate members also distributed images of the question paper among job seekers through the online messaging app — WhatsApp. Detectives claimed to have gleaned the information from five people, including the technician and three officials of the state-owned banks, arrested over the scam at different places of the city in the last couple of days. Police said that the same syndicate leaked question papers of at least three other recruitment tests and amassed more than Tk 60 crore from several thousand job seekers. At least two lakh jobseekers took the recruitment test on Saturday. Detectives said the syndicate was supposed to get Tk 7-15 lakh from each job seeker. The DB has got a list of around 200 job seekers who bought the question paper. It however believes the total number of such deals would be more than 2,000.
The DB said they got a tip-off a day before the exam and conducted an undercover operation on the test day. The law enforcers have done a great job and should continue busting such syndicates. However the question remains why the organisers of the recruitment test did not take measures to address the problem of leakage by readying alternative question papers. This is a show of incompetence that the people of the country do not deserve. Only a full-fledged probe can reveal what else, if any, was behind the scandal.
