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Cheating in India has reached new highs — literally.

Parents and friends in the town of Mahnat, Bihar, shinned up four storeys of the crumbling Vidya Niketa School to pass notes to students who were inside taking exams.

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A video shows police standing helplessly by while youths and men, some using ropes, climbed up the building in broad daylight.

In another video, police are seen slapping girls as they pull out cheat sheets from underneath their tables.

Similar scenes played out at towns across the state, notoriously one of India’s most backward and corrupt. At least three people were injured in falls.

P.K Shahi, the Bihar education minister, tried to shrug off the government’s responsibility to control the tests, according to a report in The Times of India.

“The government is helpless to stop the dishonest practices unless parents and students cooperate for the same,” he said.

Cheating is common in schools in remote rural areas in India, where jobs and seats in college courses are few, but competition is fierce. But the sight of parents risking life and limb to climb the walls shocked many Indians.

Under Bihar’s anti-cheating law, at least 600 12th-grade students were expelled and their parents detained for cheating in tests.

National Post, with files from The Washington Post and news services