Shadow of Exam Malpractice

Greetings, everyone!

My final year in school was very tough. I faced a lot of challenges, and at some moments, I saw my bad ending from my standing position due to the tough situations I was in.

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During the first semester examination of that last phase in school, a particular course, a very strong engineering course, had us sweating and our lives threatened. The course is such that a code (an engineering code) is needed to decode some of the questions to arrive at an answer. Oh yeah, we were taught with the code during lectures, and the code was needed for the exam.

Before the examination, the lecturer of the course made it clear for us to go and print/photocopy our own copies to be brought to the exam hall, and he emphasized that nothing aside from the code must be written on the booklet. If by any means, anything implicating is found, he's going to make sure the student fails the course and faces the malpractice panel.

When I was sourcing for money to get my own copy , a friend approached me to sell hers to me. According to her, she had bought one before, and a friend of hers bought another one for her without her knowledge, so she was having a double and it was a waste of resources. She wanted to sell one of them at a cheap rate.
For me, that's the kind of thing I like, so I didn't give it a second thought to concur easily. I bought it at a very cheap rate and took my time to check thoroughly for anything implicating therein, and I found none.

On the day of the exam, the examiner came with his team to check all the booklets containing the engineering code. In fact, we were made to stop writing as they moved from one desk to another checking the booklets.
To be sincere, I found the exam so simple because I was well-prepared for the exam, so I wasn't afraid or venting anger at the time wasting, even though they claimed to return the time wasted to us.

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He got to my desk, I boldly shifted the booklet to him to check. He flipped the paper thoroughly, and the next thing I heard was, "Hey Mr. Thomson, come and give this guy a malpractice form!" He called out one of them who was in charge of forcing victims to fill out malpractice forms to come over to my seat.
His voice sent shivers down my spine; I couldn't fathom what was happening. "Sir, what did you find?" I asked him, holding his hand from moving away.
He opened a page in the book and showed me a page where something aside from the coding figures was written, and guess what? It was merely "parallel" that was written there, which had nothing to do with the exam.

_{This is it;
It was written there by the main owner with a pen, maybe when he was studying and his hands became scratchy, he decided to pen down something. So it was photocopied alongside it without taking note of it or without considering it'll be an exam malpractice factor. And for me, I only bought it from a friend.}

"Sir, can't you see? This is a photocopy material, and besides, 'parallel' has nothing to do with the exam," I challenged him, trying to justify myself, but the man didn't listen, and he kept emphasizing the warning he gave earlier about not writing anything on the booklet.

That was it; I was charged with examination malpractice for merely having irrelevant word on my booklet.

Do you know what that means? It's final year, and it's a carryover thing already. It became a big concern to
me. I tried to justify myself but no way, I was forced to fill the examination malpractice form which I was also stopped from writing.

The good thing was that, the examiner later decided to let go of the issue after he collected money from us to 'destroy' the examination malpractice form already filled.
I was relieved of that but another bugging issue was how I was going to pass thr course since I was stopped halfway.

Well, before the issue, I had written a good number of questions and that saw me through to pass the course.

Thanks for reading.

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_{This is my entry to the Week 108, Edition 01 of the Weekly Featured contest in Hive Learners Community}