Courtesy of Study International
On May 1st, it came to light that there were a series of 2024 final IB exam paper leaks circulating Reddit, a social forum website. Currently, the IB examinations are ongoing between the 24th of April and the 17th of May, as the school year comes to a close.
An anonymous person by the username of u/Economic-Ad1987 posted links and pictures to a document that claimed to be an official copy of the Mathematics AA Higher Level exam on Reddit. This user created a Subreddit, which is a forum page on Reddit that is dedicated to a specific topic, with the title r/pirateIB. After a torrent of reports, the user was banned and the Subreddit was taken down, but there is currently an active r/pirateIB2 that is yet to be removed.
Other users on Reddit speculated that the user who uploaded the leaks was a university student from Spain. There were Spanish expressions in the titles of exam documents and the Mathematics exam was uploaded at 10:51 PM GMT+2. The time zone is relevant because Spain is the only Spanish-speaking country at GMT+2. This was later allegedly confirmed on a Discord server, a voice, video, and text chat app, called “IBDocs” where someone released the leaker’s full legal name and the university they go to.
The Mathematics AA Higher Level exam this user posted had questions, maximum point values, answers, and written-out details on how to solve the problems. They went further to share a private Telegram room with even more links to “leaked” information on other IB exams. Aside from the Mathematics AA HL exam, the Telegram room provided links to other PDF files with questions, answers, and other data for:
Global Politics Paper 1 & Paper 2
Chemistry Standard Level Paper 1 (but only 10 full questions leaked)
Biology Standard Level Paper 1
Physics Standard Level Paper 1
Mathematics AI High Level Paper 1 & 2
Mathematics AI Standard Level Paper 2
Excerpt of the leaked Mathematics AA Higher Level exam
With the main leak being the Mathematics AA Higher Level exam, the link shows that it is standing at an impressive 18,249 downloads as of the evening of May 4th. Aside from the initial Mathematics AA Higher Level exam, it seemed like the other papers were notes, questions, and equations that students used and later reconstructed from memory. Several students are responsible for the compilation of questions and answers and the doxxed Spanish university student happened to be the one to spread it.
The owner of the pirateIB Telegram room posted a long apology today at 8:01 AM KST. They claimed that they “have always been committed to bringing students an easy path to academic excellence by providing a massive collection of helpful resources,” and that the “leaks were tried out as an experiment, thinking that it would be useful and well received by the community.” According to them, the reason for the leaks was for “students to do a last-minute review for the exams.”
Students who are currently taking their exams are clamoring for justice as students expect that the grading scale may be heavily shifted as IBO, the institution overseeing the exams, attempts to remedy the situation. Although IBO stated that they will not change their grading scale or methods, this continues to be a concern. Others on Reddit were not surprised at this leak and claimed that there will be cheaters every year and there’s nothing to do about it except doing their best.
IBO has yet to release a public statement regarding this situation.
Amidst growing concerns about exam integrity and ways to avoid cheating scandals, the need for digitization of academic exams proves to be great. Digitizing the IB exams would lead to faster grading, minimize cheating via photocopies and pictures, and decrease the cost of logistics of printing and preparing exam sheets. Regardless of what kind of direction IBO decides to take for the future, taking a hard look at how the exams are conducted appears to be necessary.
저작권자 ⓒ 국제학교뉴스, 무단 전재 및 재배포 금지