Education Ministry director comes under after two more matriculation exams leaked

The education ministry decided to move forward with the exam and use alternate questionnaires.

By HAYAH GOLDLIST-EICHLER
Students (photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)
Students
(photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)
Two English-language matriculation exams were leaked onto social media on Monday, hours before the exam was due to begin.
The Education Ministry decided to move forward with the exam and use alternate questionnaires.
It later announced it was extending the allotted time for the exam by half an hour.
The leak is thought to have come from an Arab village in the north of Israel.
This comes just days after two Hebrew-language exams for the Arab sector were found leaked onto social media. Those two exams were postponed to a future date.
Education Ministry director-general Michal Cohen said last week upon learning of the leaked exams that it is unfortunate that a small group of lawbreakers is hurting everyone in the system.
“These offenders are not just harming the students but the education system and society as a whole,” she said. Cohen instructed the department of examinations to hand last week’s case over to the police for investigation.
Meretz MK Esawi Frej called upon Cohen to immediately resign from her position “in view of her responsibility for the failure of the matriculation exams that is becoming more serious and widespread every day.”
Frej went on to accuse Cohen and the ministry of systemic failure to “protect the integrity of the exams.” He added that if Cohen herself does not resign, it will be Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s responsibility, in his role as current education minister, to remove her from her position and to take the necessary steps “to return the confidence of Arab society in the Education Ministry, first and foremost by investing all the necessary resources to catch the criminals and to prevent the recurrence of these incidences in the future.”