Iraq blocks internet to stop students cheating in exams

Cheating in exams has assumed such proportions in Iraq that officials are blocking the internet nationwide to prevent students from accessing leaked exam answers via Facebook.

Since Saturday, authorities had blocked online access from 5 am to 8 am daily, according to education ministry spokeswoman Hadeel al-Ameri.

The exam papers are received at schools only hours before the tests start at 8 am.

According to al-Ameri, the tough measures were a bid to ensure that some of the country's 600,000 primary school students could not access answers purchased ahead of national standardised tests.

"We asked the Communications Ministry to shut off Internet services because we knew that some students - those who are lazy - started to use the Internet trying to get [answers]," she added, broadcaster NBC reported.

"Security departments were able to arrest some people who were trying to leak the questions and we found out that there were few people in the [education] ministry who used to leak these questions," al-Ameri said, without specifying exactly how many people had been detained.

One Iraqi internet service provider (ISP), EarthLink, announced today's blackout on its Facebook page. The company said, ''As instructed by the Ministry of Communication, internet services will be cut off in all of Iraq during the time of exams from 5am until 8am for all companies across all provinces.''

According to commentators, while shutting off the internet proved to be undoubtedly efficient, the outage impacted every person and business in the parts of the country controlled by the Iraqi government.

Human rights campaigners, including Access Now, had condemned the move.

The area of Kurdistan, was not affected, by the blackout, Dyn Research said. beyond the control of the Iraqi authorities.

Iraq is known to resort to such measures to affect the flow of information. Last year, it conducted similar blackouts at exam times, and also attempted to take areas controlled by Isis offline to clamp down on the spread of propaganda.