Ethiopia Turned Off The Entire Country’s Internet Just To Stop Some High Schoolers From Cheating

via Shutterstock

I’m just going to come right out with it: I was an excellent cheater during my school years.

Cheat sheets on the inside of my water bottle, wandering eyes, using Google, morse code — you name a test cheating method, and I probably employed it at one point or another. In fact, I took quite pride in it. ESPECIALLY in college, where it was significantly more difficult to cut corner than high school. I always lovingly said that I only learned one thing in college: the art of survival, and cheating was a part of that.

It’s one thing to be a mindless robot, studying and regurgitating pages of a textbook to hit a certain score — it’s another beast entirely to scratch, claw, and cheat your way to that exact same score. The latter option takes balls, it takes know-how. It takes creativity and the clutch gene. It takes life skills. Anyone can read a study guide over and over again until they commit it to memory, but not everyone can figure out a way to eyeball a cheat-sheet as he has a professor and three proctors hawking him like vultures. That, my friends, is skill. That’s survival. That’s what college taught me.

But based on what I’m hearing out of Ethiopia, they take cheating in academics very seriously. SO seriously, in fact, that they disabled the entire country’s internet just to prevent any wrongdoing.

via Daily Mail:

Ethiopia has cut off internet access nationwide until at least June 8 to try to stop cheats from posting high school exam papers on social media, a government official said on Thursday.

Hundreds of thousands of students will take the tests throughout the Horn of Africa country with Grade 10 exams taking place from May 31 until June 2, and Grade 12 tests from June 5 until June 8. Last year, exam papers were widely posted online, prompting the government to reschedule the tests, which are the main public exams for 16- and 18-year-olds to secure places at university and on vocational courses.

Mohammed Seid, public relations director of Ethiopia’s Office for Government Communications Affairs, told Reuters.

‘We are being proactive. We want our students to concentrate and be free of the psychological pressure and distractions that this brings.’

Seems a littttllee drastic if you ask me.