Advance copies of exams bring up to $660

RIGA - On May 18, a day before pencils were to be sharpened to hone answers to the nearest hundredth, school officials canceled the unified secondary schools' graduation mathematics exam when they found out copies of the exam were on sale.

The practice of taking unified state exams was introduced four years ago. Every year since then the Latvian Ministry of Education and Science has had problems with sustaining confidentiality of the exams' content, said ministry spokeswoman Ilze Ake.

The ministry received information about the leak of information from two Latvian newspapers, Neatkariga Rita Avize and Lauku Avize.

"Half an hour later, the worried teachers called us, and said they suspected information to be disclosed," said Ake. "We received not only the information, but the test copies as evidence."

The test exercises available ranged in cost from 20 lats up to 400 lats ($33 - $660). Because of students' usual stress before state exams, enterprising exam retailers offered copies of both the math and English exams on the Internet in the second half of April.

The state exams in total cost more than 70,000 lats from the state budget to cover production, materials, evaluation, transportation, monitoring and security.

To provide secrecy, the ministry's Education Content and Examination Division sends the parcels of exams to 38 school boards including all Latvian secondary schools only a week before the test day. This year the postal system Latvijas Pasts couriers delivered the parcels on May 12. Only half an hour before examination can school directors receive the exam envelopes with only as many copies as the number of students to be tested.

The Ministry of Education suspended the examination three hours after it received the first signals of a possible leak of information. The announcement was accompanied with an official request for school boards to deliver parcels with all the envelopes intact to the ministry before May 22.

"We received all 38 parcels in the so-called "safety bags." Four of them were damaged, but not opened. They are in the expertise of the police now. But the parcel from the Riga Northern District School Board lacked an envelope assigned to Riga School No. 31," said Ake.

Marite Grebzde, the head of the Riga Northern District School Board, said that they received only 18 envelopes with the math exam file copies instead of 19, missing the envelope assigned to Riga School No. 31.

"We always have some problems with this school. What supports my words is that for the May 18 exam we received 19 parcels with the test copies," she said.

The postponed math exam mandatory for all 19,072 Latvian graduate students was given on May 27.

"We always make an additional exam set, so if there are emergency situations, the state exam can still happen. We had only to duplicate and to deliver it to the schools," said Andersone, the head of the ECED.

The new exam copies were delivered to the schools shortly before the test. The regional school boards got the new exams before midnight on Friday, May 26, and Riga and Riga region school boards - from 7 a.m. to 8 a.m. on the morning of the exam."

The math exam went smoothly without any problems or any violations, said Andersone.

"This time our observers, the ministry workers monitoring the examination processes at the schools, did a very good job. If earlier we received complaints from both the schools and our observers, this time we had no problems," she said.

Grebzde had a different opinion.

"No, there were many violations, and many schools are now writing their complaints to the ministry. The translation of math exam text from Latvian to Russian was so bad that children could not understand the text of one of the exercises. If Latvian students spent five minutes to accomplish it, Russian students - 30 minutes," said Grebzde.

The ECED admitted this mistake, but "because it was made in the hectic time before re-examination, no one from ECED will be punished," said Ake. "Unfortunately, the ministry did not receive any complaint from the schools. They more willingly complain to media and not to ECED."

"I personally was the observer at School No. 13, and instead of 33 exam copies, they were delivered 55. Why, if the requests with the number of students taking the test is sent more than half a year in advance? If the copies sent would be numbered everything would be different," said Grebzde.

The ministry's investigation commission finished its work on May 30, stating that the ministry's division did not violate its duties and preserved secrecy of the materials. The envelope turned up missing after all the parcels were delivered to the destinations by the state ECED, said the report.

"We don't know either whose responsibility it is now. Unfortunately, we did not discover who stole the information." said Ake.

The state police is to continue investigation, for the moment stating that the information was stolen not via the ministry's ECED connection to the Internet, said Krists Leiskalns, spokesman for state police.

The police are investigating two possible sources of the exam theft - with the ministry's or school board's workers involved or the firm providing delivery, Latvijas Pasts.

Last year after the investigation of a similar theft, the state police detected people selling exam copies on the black market, and forwarded the case to the prosecutor's office.

Asked, how far the investigation has proceeded in finding the people who stole the exam, Leiskalns said at the moment the police don't know the answers.

The ECED has had minimal changes in staff during the four years of its existence.