The leak is confirmed. The Ministry of National Education confirmed Thursday evening June 30 that the subjects of the history-geo and patent sciences tests had circulated on social networks before the exam. Negligence or malicious act? An administrative investigation has in any case been launched to understand how the subjects on which the college students were going to work on Friday were able to leak. Franceinfo returns to this case, which is not the first of its kind.
Photos posted on WhatsApp
It was on this online messaging application that agents from the Ministry of National Education spotted suspicious photos, which turned out to be those of the subjects scheduled for the second day of the 2022 patent tests. On these pictures, which franceinfo was able to consult, we can see a few pages of the subject of science, but also the seven pages which make up the subject of history-geography and civic and moral education.
This leak was considered significant enough for these subjects to be withdrawn from circulation and replaced by emergency statements, said the National Education. The disclosure of these subjects concerns all candidates in the general stream, i.e. 770,863 middle school students on the 856,172 candidates registered in mainland France and in the overseas departments and regions, notes the specialized site Studyrama.
National Education will file a complaint
Thursday evening, after confirming that the leaked statements were authentic, the Ministry of National Education announced to AFP its intention to file a complaint for disclosure of the subject of a public examination. According to the law of December 23, 1901, which regulates these tests, any fraud relating to these examinations constitutes an offence. This applies, for example, to anyone “knowingly communicating, before the examination or competition, to any of the interested parties, the text or the subject of the test”says the law.
Offenders risk a fine of 9,000 euros or a sentence of 3 years in prison, or both. “In reality, the sentences pronounced for this type of case are generally very light, around 3 or 4 months in prison, suspended at the most, pointed out the criminal lawyer Olivier Morice, questioned by Le Figaro in 2019. Because it is always extremely difficult to prove that the authors of the leak were really aware that this was indeed the subject of the examination of the current year.
Other tank leaks in the past
In 2011, already, an exercise of the mathematics test intended for the graduates of the scientific sector had leaked on the internet. Tkings young men had been indicted, in Marseille, suspected of having recovered the document from the father of one of them, who had carried out the maintenance of a printer of the rectorate of Aix-Marseille. In 2014, baccalaureate subjects had also leaked on social networks, an hour before the philosophy tests.
A large-scale fraud had again occurred during the baccalaureate in 2019. The Paris prosecutor’s office then opened an investigation after leaks concerning the mathematics tests of the general series, relayed by WhatsApp private messaging, by SMS and on an online forum. A total of 21 people had been placed in police custody and four of them had been indicted, including two candidates and a supervisor from a high school in the Paris region.