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Updated: Mar 01, 2016 10:04 IST

Candidates appearing in army recruitment examination in Bihar’s Muzaffarpur District were asked to sit in their underwear to prevent cheating.

Around 1150 candidates had appeared for the exam on Sunday when they were ordered to take off their clothes and sit in only underwear in an open ground.

The examination was being conducted for the recruitment of clerks in the army.

Read more: The kids are not all right: Going beyond the Bihar paper cheats

According to a report in the Indian Express, candidates were asked to remove their clothes to “save time on frisking so many people.

The director of the army recruitment board defending the outrageous order by saying, “We earlier had a bad experience while conducting exams. This has been done to avoid cheating.”

Last year, photographs of the mass cheating in Bihar – parents climbing the wall of a school building trying to pass on chits to their wards in the exam hall — grabbed eyeballs because of the spectacle it was.

Read more: Caught cheating in exam, Jamshedpur college girl jumps off building

But the reactions it elicited were mostly pretentious – “all this” happens only in Bihar or “What kind of parents are these… They want their wards to cheat?” or, lastly, “What will these kids grow up to?”

Large scale cheating was also reported in Madhya Pradesh’s Bhind town only a few days before the Bihar incident. There too relatives of candidates gathered at examination centres to help them submit a perfect answer-script.

A detailed story by the Los Angeles Times, documents how, in states like Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and West Bengal cheating in school exams is a very common phenomenon. The report showcases practices of writing formula on classroom walls, teachers being bribed to allow copying in exams, students breaking CCTV cameras to avoid being caught on camera cheating, and even parents tossing chits wrapped around small stones through windows into the exam halls.

With inputs from Agencies