Seven students held for cheating in Duolingo Exam Test

Seven students from Hyderabad were caught by LB Nagar Special Operation Team (SOT) for impersonating and attending Duolingo Exam Test (DET) on behalf of other candidates, who were vying for admissions to international universities of USA, Ireland, and Australia by impersonation at Hayathnagar, police said on Tuesday.

The DET is a well know online English proficiency test, in the lines of TOEFL, IELTS and TOEIC, designed for internet, rather than paper-based and is accepted by over 5, 000 universities worldwide including the likes of Harvad, Stanford, MIT and Yale Universities.

Out of the seven students, according to the police, four were candidates preparing for admissions in foreign universities, two were mediators who facilitated the enterprise and one was the student who wrote the exam on behalf of the four others. The suspects used to collect anywhere between Rs 5,000 and Rs. 10,000 from each student, to get an eligible score and clear the DET exam, police said.

The arrested



persons were identified as Kandakatla Praveen Reddy (22), student of B.Sc Computer Science at Keshav Memorial Institute of Commerce and Science, who wrote the exam in place of the four students. Two other students including Trivedhi Harinath (21), BBA student of Pasha Noble Degree College and Banala Krishna (21), a B.Com student of Avinash College of Commerce, acted as mediators for the entire operation.

The four candidates who were supposed to take the English exam but colluded with others for impersonation include Edavally Aravind Reddy (21) and Nenavath Santhosh (22), both B.Tech students of Mallareddy Institute of Engineering and Technology, Malladi Naveen (26), M.Sc Computer Science student at Kakatiya University and Alakuntla Vinay (22), a B.Tech student at Teegala Krishna Reddy Engineering College.

Officials seized 5 laptops, 4 passports, 7 mobile phones and other material from the spot. The arrested students along with the seized material were handed over to the Hayathnagar police for further action.