An outrageous new cheating scandal has rocked this year's final secondary school results. Mustafa El-Menshawy investigates Earlier this summer, several secondary school students decided that they wanted to take their final exams in a more comfortable atmosphere. Instead of going to school to sit for the two weeks of gruelling thanawiya amma tests, they set up a system by which the tests came to them, in a furnished flat they rented for that precise purpose. Teachers were paid to provide them with the answers as well. Last week, their ill-fated plan was exposed. Up to 52 students, along with senior officials from the Ministry of Education and 16 public and private school teachers, were allegedly involved in the scheme. Since the "incident involves administrative violations and crimes, the ministry has referred the entire matter to administrative and public prosecutors for investigations," Education Minister Ahmed Gamaleddin Moussa told Al-Ahram Weekly. According to Moussa, the students exploited a ministry rule allowing them to sit for exams outside of their own schools for humanitarian or emergency reasons. But instead of going to other schools to take their exams, the cheating students used rented furnished flats in Haram and Agouza, two Giza governorate neighbourhoods. Investigations revealed that teachers were also accomplices in the plan, providing the students with answers and delivering the completed exams to the right schools. As news of the scandal made headlines, the public was shocked by the sheer number of individuals involved (earlier cases of cheating widely reported in 2001 and 2002 included scattered incidents of parents and teachers helping students cheat by throwing answers to them through classroom windows), as well as by allegations that several of the cheaters came from prominent families who also happened to be members of the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP). While opposition newspaper Al-Ahrar quoted official education sources as saying that, "NDP leaders are trying to pressure prosecutors to close the case," NDP Policies Committee member Hossam Badrawi said he had no knowledge of such claims. Doubling as chairman of parliament's Education Committee, Badrawi said he had asked the Education Ministry for details on the scandal so that the committee could discuss the matter. He provided no definite date, however, for a possible committee meeting on the subject. At a press conference in Alexandria on Sunday, meanwhile, Moussa vowed to expose any corruption in the ministry, saying he would do all he could to help prosecutors complete their job. "This is a catastrophe that underlines how rampant corruption has become in the Ministry of Education and across other sectors of our society," Ahmed Youssef of the National Centre for Education Research and Development told the Weekly. The way to avoid cheating, he said, was to place less emphasis on the thanawiya amma, raise public awareness about the "immorality of cheating as a crime", and impose strict rules against corruption generally. Mona Sherif, a third year secondary school student, said the rampant cheating on exams this year angered her. "Cheating has become completely normal, with even the test monitors helping students copy from others." Arguing that the situation had become highly unfair, Sherif wondered, "why cheaters and those who study studiously throughout the year end up being admitted to the same colleges in the end?" Moussa said a certain amount of cheating and corruption was only natural when there were 15.3 million students in the education system, and 1.7 million employees, including teachers. Youssef and other analysts, however, said cheating has remarkably increased in the last 25 or 30 years. Mohamed El-Karariti, the Education Ministry's under-secretary for exam affairs, acknowledged that 19,000 students (out of roughly one million second and third year secondary students who took this year's thanawiya amma tests) have submitted complaints alleging that their exam sheets were wrongly corrected or even altered. On Sunday, reports emerged that first and second year students at a technical education school in Fayoum, 100 kilometres south of Cairo, skipped a school year by forging certificates to the effect that they had graduated. The next day, the press reported a complaint by third year secondary school student Ghada Abdel-Rahman, who said her biology test was altered. Abdel-Rahman and other students, the paper said, had lodged these and similar complaints with the police.
