Tamanna Nusrat, from the ruling Awami League party in Bangladesh, has been accused of hiring lookalikes to take her exams for her.Nusrat, who was elected in parliament last year, has been expelled from university for allegedly using up to eight impersonators in at least 13 tests. A tweet by The Guardian shows the woman who posed as Nusrat on the left.Nusrat was enrolled in a Bachelor of Arts course with Bangladesh Open University (BOU).BOU head MA Mannan told AFP that “We expelled her because she has committed a crime. A crime is a crime” and that “we have cancelled her enrolment. She will never be able to get admitted here again.”An unnamed college official said that “The proxy students were protected by the MP’s musclemen when they sat for the tests. Everybody knew it but nobody uttered a word because she is from a very influential family.”As expected, Twitter users trolled the story.
The case went viral after private broadcaster Nagorik TV entered an exam hall to confront one of the impersonators in a video posted on Friday, October 18. The TV channel claims that the MP has not attended any of the 13 exams that were held over the four terms of her course.
Advertisement
Getting students not to cheat is always a difficult task for schools. Recently, viral photos showed that an Indian college made its students wear boxes over their heads to stop them from cheating.In India, there are even criminal gangs that specialise in ways to get ahead in exams thriving mainly in UP and Bihar, and who will do everything from leaking question papers to having examination centres infiltrated by examiners and teachers on their payroll, to even—in a move that might resonate with Nusrat—sending an impersonator to take an exam for someone else.Find Edoardo on Twitter and Instagram.