Secondary school exams are not quite what they were, writes Mohamed El-Sayed The thanawiya amma, annual rite of passage for generations of school students, have long dominated the month of June. The future of students depends on the results of the examinations -- whether they will be admitted to the faculties they want or not, and from thence to their career of choice. This June, though, incessant talk of exams has taken on a scandalous tone, as accusations have emerged of institutionalised cheating. In Dairout, a town in the Upper Egyptian governorate of Assiut, the head of the examination board, Mohamed Mehani, was fired last week after it was found he had facilitated his daughter's cheating in her final exams. Under thanawiya amma regulations, issued by the Ministry of Education in November 2003 in an attempt to guarantee the neutrality of examination supervisors, no relative of a student can sit on any exam control body. Yet Mehani's case, according to press reports, is not an isolated incident. Currently two heads of examination boards in Cairo are being investigated in an attempt to discover how they were appointed despite the fact that both have children sitting exams that fall under their supervision. Reports of widespread cheating first emerged in 2001 and 2002, when some parents and teachers were accused of going so far as to throw answers written on screwed up balls of paper through the windows of examination rooms. More recently, concerns have been growing that teachers and senior Ministry of Education officials are systematically undermining the integrity of examinations. In 2005, the public was shocked by the news that a group of wealthy students, having decided they wanted to take their exams in more comfortable -- and less stringently supervised -- surroundings, arranged to have the exams sent to them at a furnished apartment rented for the purpose. It subsequently emerged that 154 teachers and administrative employees had been bribed to allow the students to sit exams in their venue of choice, as well as providing them with the answers as well. The case involved 52 students, senior officials from the Ministry of Education, and 16 public and private school teachers. When the Cairo Higher Disciplinary Court finally ruled on the case, five teachers and a headmaster were dismissed, and 133 teachers and administrative employees fined. "What is most worrying," says Hamed Ammar, educationalist and professor at Ain Shams University, "is that students have adopted a Machiavellian mindset. They seem convinced that the end justifies the means, and nothing could be more harmful to the process of education." "Cheating can only make the educational process more opaque," he says, "and failing to punish those involved in cheating cases clouds transparency even further. Yet teachers who facilitate cheating tend to be reprimanded, escaping without any real punishment." Ammar sees cheating in exams as part of a much wider problem: "the increase in cheating," he says, "reflects how personal interests now outweigh public concerns. It is one more example of the crumbling of the sovereignty of law." (see p.20)
