Education Minister al-Helali al-Sherbeni has canceled the official high school dynamics exam after confirmation that the paper was leaked online in the early hours of Sunday morning.
High school students all over Egypt sat the exam (one of the papers on the mathematics curriculum) between 9 and 11 a.m. on Sunday while the questions and correct answers to the exam spread rapidly across the internet.
Following initial hesitation from inside the Education Ministry as to what action to take, the dynamics exam has now been cancelled and rescheduled for July 2.
Exams for geology, algebra, solid geometry, and history, which were scheduled for Tuesday, have been postponed until July 4.
Prior to the decision to cancel the exam, an informed ministry source had said that most probably the ministry would wait for a random sample of candidates' results to be checked, following the usual procedure, to determine whether candidates were producing answers identical to the model answers. Based on this, the source predicted, a decision would be made about whether students should resit the exam.
A number of students confirmed that the questions in the official paper were the same as those circulated online.
The Facebook page, “Shawming Byghashish Thanaweya Amma" (Shawming's cheats for high school exams), the culprit behind a succession of leaks over the course of this exam season, announced at 2 a.m. Sunday that it had obtained the dynamics paper.
Despite the arrest of the notorious Facebook page's alleged administrator earlier this month, the page has been linked to the circulation of several exam papers since.
The page has been leaking exams online since 2013, and over the course of this exam season has published online numerous official papers including the Arabic, English, religion, geography and mathematics exams. The page specializes in supplying the correct answers to questions along with the question papers. The leakages have prompted the cancellation of exams and protests from students and parents outside the Education Ministry.
Information gathered in coordination with the Cyber Crime Combat department indicated that the administrator of the Facebook page was an Alexandria-based high school student called Mohannad Osama Ahmed Moussa.
Charges were leveled against the suspect, who admitted to running three Facebook pages with the same name and to leaking the English language exam by photographing the questions on his mobile phone while sitting the exam. His laptop and tablet were seized. It was found that they contained the information of more than 30 pages for cheating online and hackers.
Nevertheless, the Education Ministry and public security sector continue their crackdown on all forms of cheating, with specific focus on finding and bringing to justice those who continue to operate the webpages fueling the leakages crisis.
Yet for exam candidates hoping to enter universities on the basis of their results this year, many fear the damage has already been done. Fears are mounting that an inflexible admissions system will not take into account the unfair advantage gained by some from leakages and cheating, meaning hardworking students may miss out.
Edited translation from Al-Masry Al-Youm
