University fails over 1,200 students after exam walkout

Egypt’s state-run Mansoura University has announced the mass failure of over a thousand medical students after they staged a walkout from the examination hall in protest against what they said were overly-tough questions contained in a surgery paper.

The university board took a decision at a meeting held on Tuesday, 23 January that the students would be given a zero in the written surgery exam due to their misconduct.

"This decision was taken in view of this grave act and its serious impact on the educational process," the university said in a statement after the meeting.

The case, which has riveted the academic community and the general public in Egypt, and attracted significant media attention, is unprecedented in Egypt. It dates back to mid-November when medical students at the provincial university left exam halls en masse over what they called the paper’s “crippling” questions. Some of the students reportedly tore up their exam sheets in protest.

In response, Mansoura University formed an inquiry committee and sent the controversial examination questions to medical professors at the public universities of Cairo, Ain Shams and Alexandria in order for them to be objectively assessed.

The university said footage from surveillance cameras in and around the exam halls showed that a group of students disrupted order at the venue and “incited” their peers to join them in the walkout.

All the students, estimated to number between 1,200 and 1,300, are in the sixth year of Mansoura University’s medical school course, according to media reports.

The inquiry panel recommended that all students be given a zero and that the group of students and teaching staff, who started the crisis, be interrogated for possible punitive action.

“The university’s fact-finding committee also concluded that the students left the exam halls 35 minutes after the start of the exam time,” the institution’s vice-president, Ashraf Abdel Basset, said.

He added that 35 minutes was not enough time for students to check all the 130 questions in the exam sheet. “All experts who assessed the exam questions emphasised that they were in line with quality criteria and could be answered by an intermediate-level student,” Abdel Basset told private Egyptian television Al Nahar.

Some students, however, disputed the university’s account of the incident.

“The surgery exam was very tough. It had 46 questions which were unrelated to the syllabus,” Shahinaz Alaa, one of the students, said. “When students objected to the difficulty of the exam, professors threatened to punish them,” she told Al Hadith Al Youm, another private Egyptian television station. “We left the exam hall peacefully.”

In its Tuesday statement, the university board said it would investigate those students who had incited their peers to leave the exam. If found guilty, they could face expulsion, according to experts.

The university also said it would take unspecified measures against the medical school's staffers who were overseeing the exam for “their failure to contain the students”.

Days before Mansoura University announced the punitive measures, Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research Khaled Abdel Ghaffar condemned the mass walkout of the exam as “unacceptable”.

“Violating norms in Egyptian universities will not go unpunished,” Abdel Ghaffar, a former dentistry student at Ain Shams University, said in media remarks.

In recent years, Egyptian authorities have tightened curbs on academic institutions that were rocked by violent protests following the army’s 2013 overthrow of democratically elected but divisive Islamist president Mohamed Morsi.