In recent months, I have found myself revisiting everything I have written through the same question: What is the point? Whenever I go back to my old articles, I find myself thinking that all I need to do is change the date and republish the same piece. Education. The Tawjihi. Politics. Elections. Corruption. The killing of women. Public safety. Even grave robbing. Yet it isn’t quite that simple. Every time I return to those articles, I realize that reality hasn’t simply repeated itself. It has surpassed even the bleakest scenarios I could have imagined.
Rather than linger on questions of purpose, I’ll get to the point.
For years, I have described the Tawjihi—Jordan and Palestine’s high-stakes secondary school leaving exam—as a recurring nightmare. My concern was never only the pressure it places on students. I questioned the value of the exam itself and whether a system built around a single decisive test could genuinely improve education, especially when those who can afford alternatives increasingly choose international qualifications such as the SAT, the International Baccalaureate (IB), or Israel’s Bagrut. What I witnessed this year, however, made me feel that I had fallen behind that debate.
Students, it seems, have found their own way of dealing with this nightmare: cheating in every form. Years ago, we used to talk about the different methods students invented to cheat. Cheating was something done in secret, cautiously, and with the awareness that it had to remain hidden. That is no longer the case.
A car pulled up outside one of the schools. Loudspeakers were mounted on its roof. A young man grabbed a microphone and announced:
“Helping students during the exam is a good deed.”
Then he began reading out the answers to the exam questions, loudly enough for students inside the school, residents of the surrounding buildings, and anyone passing by on the street to hear. Nothing about the scene suggested that anyone was trying to hide what was happening.
Questions flooded my mind. How had they obtained the exam questions? Where were the supervisors? Where were the officials responsible for the school? This was a national examination, supposedly protected by strict security measures—not an ordinary test that could turn into a public performance in the middle of the street.
As usual, my colleague and I went out—like Tarzan, as we jokingly say when someone decides to play the hero—to see what was happening and ask them to stop this farce, one that was profoundly unfair to the students who had spent months preparing for the exam.
Instead, we found ourselves facing a group of young men and women surrounding the car. The young women, much to my surprise, formed the first line of defense, preventing anyone from getting close. Another young man stood nearby, armed with nothing more than his mobile phone, filming anyone who tried to document what was happening.
One message echoed from everyone around us:
“Don’t film. The cheaters must be protected.”
The scene felt surreal.
The young men did not surprise me. We have become accustomed to associating this kind of public intimidation with them. What surprised me were the young women standing beside them, defending with the same determination the right of those inside the school to receive the answers. At that moment, I realized I was no longer looking at cheating. I was looking at cheating that had found people willing to protect it, prevent it from being documented, and defend it.
The moment we tried to stop what was happening, we became the problem. We were accused of being infiltrators, traitors, people trying to deprive others of their chance to pass. Somehow, objecting to the cheating had become the offense, while broadcasting the exam answers through loudspeakers had become perfectly ordinary.
Amid the shouting, one of the young women turned to me and said,
“May God hold you accountable.”
That wasn’t what shocked me most.
The real shock came when I returned home and told my daughter what had happened.
Her first response was simple:
“The problem isn’t cheating. The problem is that the Tawjihi itself is a failed system.”
She argued that many of those who cheat have no intention of going to university. They simply want to get through this stage of their lives. And those who do make it to university, she said, will not survive there unless they are capable of succeeding on their own.
Listening to her, I realized that, for many people, cheating is no longer seen as an act deserving condemnation. It has become a predictable consequence of an educational system in which they have lost all faith.
After everything I witnessed that day, I no longer know where accountability should begin.
With an education system that has lost its purpose?
With cheating that has moved into the open and found people willing to justify and protect it?
With institutions that were nowhere to be seen during a scene that should never have been possible?
Or with homes where cheating has come to be seen as a natural response to the failure of the Tawjihi?
The problem is no longer confined to the Tawjihi, or to cheating itself. It has become a web of threads. Every thread you pull leads you to another knot.