Online app that hacks your exam with just a click

A preview of your next exam is now just a click away. Examify is a web application that, as the firm’s 18-year-old technology officer Angad Nadkarni explained, “predicts your examination”.. Pramit Pal Chaudhuri reports.

A preview of your next exam is now just a click away. Examify is a web application that, as the firm’s 18-year-old technology officer Angad Nadkarni explained, “predicts your examination”. There’s no cheating involved, just software.

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Examify.com’s other partner, Samudra Bhuyan, 28, said they use an algorithm to plough through old exam papers to calculate the best answers to questions and look for patterns to help a student work out what he should focus his time on.

The free app uses “crowd sourcing to cut through the noise” the average Indian student faces. It will “even tell you whether you have been studying too much magnetism and not enough thermodynamics”.

Before the site’s official launch, speaking at a TedX conference in Mumbai last month, Nadkarni declared: “I’m going to hack the examination system.”

Bhuyan and Nadkarni have already assembled more than 92,000 examination questions for some 30 exams. A user registers for free and asks for, say, the 10 most likely fill-in-the-blank questions for the CBSE Class 10 English test or answers to physics questions that received the highest points in ICSE exams.

The two partners came together thanks to investor Vishal Gondal. Bhuyan, a Mumbai University engineering graduate, came up with the idea after working as a GMAT instructor. He and Nadkarni, a BITS Pillani product and a white hat hacker at the age of 13, plan more refinements. For example, Examify will soon tell you what your friends are studying. They also plan to add foreign exams like the SAT and GMAT to the roster.

They hope to make money on the site by offering premium services, such as having individual teachers provide extra assistance for a fee. “But that’s several months in the future,” said Bhuyan.

Will this dumb down the Indian student? Bhuyan compares Examify to the tutorial industry and sees it as a social leveller: “The Indian student’s problem today is the overwhelming amount of information they have to shift through to get the right answers. You don’t get teachers with the quality to show you how to do it. Tutorials are available only to the rich. Examify will make such intel available to a lot more people.”

Do teachers object? “We’ve got teachers contributing their exam papers and the answers to add to our database,” said Bhuyan.

The website: www.examify.com