NEW DELHI: Anti-cheating tools will be built into the proposed online common eligibility test (CET) for recruitment to central government jobs, with officials saying the exam algorithm will ensure both encryption and jumbling of questions to rule out copying by candidates.Minister of state of personnel Jitendra Singh said the CET will be designed to “cheat the cheater”. “Candidates will realise that they will not gain anything by climbing up walls and windows,” he said in reference to a viral photograph from a school in Bihar which showed men scampering up the exam centre’s wall, standing on sun shades and passing answer chits from the windows to examinees inside.Secretary (personnel) C Chandramouli added, “The online exam will offer full security against copying/cheating or leakage of question paper. The algorithm will ensure that each candidate gets a different question paper, with order of the questions jumbled. The paper itself will be encrypted at the central server.”The CET is proposed to be conducted by the National Recruitment Agency (NRA), a universal body mooted for holding entry-level recruitment examination for Group ‘B’ and ‘C’ posts that are currently handled by different recruitment agencies such as Staff Selection Commission , Railway Recruitment Board and Institute of Banking Personnel Selection.Singh said the common, online exam by a single recruitment agency — the scores for which will be valid for three years — will cut costs, inconvenience and time taken for recruitment process for non-gazetted jobs, both for the government recruiting agency as well as the candidates. “It is a socio-economic reform aimed at ensuring a level playing field by facilitating recruitment to government jobs irrespective of a candidate’s social status and availability of resources,” he said.Chandramouli said with the launch of CET, possibly with the recruitment cycle of 2021, the recruitment time for government posts may be reduced to as little as three months from the 12-18 months taken at present.Around 2.5 crore aspirants currently take separate, multiple examinations conducted by different recruiting agencies for selection to an average 1.25 lakh government jobs each year.