Two students arrested for allegedly leaking high school exams
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Two university students have been arrested for allegedly leaking papers for the “Thanaweya Amma” (high school) exams on social networking websites, the Ministry of Interior told official news agency Middle East News Agency (MENA) on Thursday.

Mohamed Moustafa Abdel Gawad and Mahmoud Moustafa Hussein have been named as the admins of two Facebook groups that used to leak the exams as well as the answers, minutes before the exams started.

The two students were arrested from their homes as police forces confiscated their laptops with copies of the exams allegedly stored and published on the Facebook pages they run.

The Interior Ministry added that four others have been arrested in the last 72 hours. All cases have been referred to the prosecution for investigation, the ministry said.

Prosecutor General Hisham Barakat ordered the closure of all Facebook groups leaking the exams. But various groups, including those whose admins were arrested, were still leaking exams.

A Facebook page named “Chaw Ming Leaks Thanaweya Amma Exams,” run by Gawad, recently leaked the statistics exam. The page’s last exam was leaked three hours from the time this article went to press.

The page run by Hussein, named “Lovers of Minister of Education,” was shut down.

Two other Facebook pages, “Cheating Commandos” and “Leaking Thanaweya Amma Exams 2013,” were both leaking the answers of a mathematics exam. The latter had been leaking Thanaweya Amma exams since last year.

The group admins use hashtags such as “Let me cheat, thanks” and “Cheating commandos.” The groups have seen huge responses and interaction with Thanaweya Amma students desperate to get better grades.

Thanaweya Amma exams are uniform across the country and have been always a source of anxiety for Egyptian high school students, mostly because the grades they receive in these exams determine the schools they can join later. For them, these tests “determine their entire future.”

“Chaw Ming Leaks Thanaweya Amma Exams” has over 65,000 followers, and sometimes it leaks the exams one night before the exam. In other cases, the exams and answers are leaked just a few minutes before the exams.

Many students were caught while hiding their mobile phones inside the exam rooms to access the Internet and receive the answers.

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