Teachers in lucrative question leak trade

A nexus of employees from the question paper formulation committee of education boards, the district administration and the Bangladesh Government Press, colluding with school and college teachers, are behind the frequent leaks of SSC and HSC questions. Nine people, including four teachers, were detained on Tuesday from the Dhaka’s Tejgaon, not many days after the education minister’s allegation that some unscrupulous teachers are behind the crime. The teachers apparently use different social media sites and apps, including closed Facebook groups, to disseminate screen shots of questions before the exams. The four detained teachers are Ashulia’s AM High School and College’s principal Md Mozaffar Hoaasin, its teacher Md Ataqul Islam, Srishty Central School and College’s teacher Md Jahangir Alam and Tongi-based coaching instructor Md Hamidur Rahman. Detective Branch of DMP detained them, in two separate operations, and found several sets of question papers of a number of subjects of last year’s JSC exams and the recently finished SSC exam. The DB members also seized screen shots of rumours of question leak and mobile sets during the raids. DB Joint Commissioner Abdul Baten in a press briefing said the dishonest officials sent screen shots to the teacher Jahangir while the MCQ questions were being delivered to the exam centre from district administration office, an hour before the exam. Later, Jahangir spread the questions through different social networking sites, especially Facebook, WhatsApp and Imo. “They have a closed group in Facebook with around 2,000 candidates, where the questions were posted,” he said, adding, upon receiving the question, a group of teachers solved it and passed on the answers to the deviant students. Principal Mozaffar was helping his clients see the answers before the exams, Baten continued.  They charged up to Tk5,000 for each question and collect the money from mobile financial service bKash, Baten said. “We are observing three points – the question formulation committee, the government press and the DC office, from where the questions are supplied to exam halls. These people were working in the third point,” he said. Meanwhile, the arrestees were put on a one-day remand each after police filed a case with Tejgaon industrial area police station. Earlier, on March 8, police detained eight people, including a teacher of Kamalapur Sher-e-Bangla Railway High School, for leaking this year’s SSC question.