While it's true that cheating can reflect badly on otherwise well-performing students (testees?), the problem is in the score-adjusting based on group performan

While it's true that cheating can reflect badly on otherwise well-performing students (testees?), the problem is in the score-adjusting based on group performance. If that does not happen, your score is yours only. Ensuring that different versions of tests are comparable in their "hardness" is what we should focus on. Perhaps India is a culture where academic/certification performance is highly valued, instead of hands-on experience. However, if "cheats" end up getting all the jobs because of that, and they end up performing well in their jobs, there is really no harm[*], other than highlighting how certification is useless. If they end up performing bad, commercial interests should incentivize employers to not look for good academic/certification performance anymore, like it's done, for instance, in most IT jobs in the "West". I've witnessed plenty of cheating in my University days, and I never felt "threatened" by "cheaters": I knew what I was in for, and if they weren't, that's their loss (and win, because we were not matched against each other). The only regret I have is that many of them ended up taking teaching jobs (I can't see how they can properly make their students excited about the art of CS), but it's because those good at CS had good industry jobs waiting for them at significant pay raise compared to academic careers (so it's not academic scores that hindered them from continuing in academia). [*] Sure, principled cheaters (it may sound like an oxymoron, but it's not), should try to get rid of the certificate-valuation (by eg anonymously exposing how easy it is to cheat, and how irrelevant it is to their on-the-job performance) to stop this money-grabbing scheme altogether.