‘We are not cheating. We are helping each other out’: Cheating, Deviance and Resistance in Egyptian Secondary Education

• In Event: Lived Experiences of Youth navigating school systems in the Middle East

Proposal

Cheating has long been an obstinate feature of Egyptian secondary assessment. Jeopardizing ideals of meritocracy and equality of opportunity, it has consistently been vilified, pathologized and criminalized by the state, which sought to combat it recently using digital technologies. Yet, while promising a tighter grip on assessment, those technologies afforded a new modality of cheating with a scale and speed unprecedented in Egyptian educational history. This research examines the social phenomenon of digital cheating at a time of assessment fetishization, post-revolutionary fervor, state-led educational digitalization, and pandemic exceptionalism. Using in-depth interviews with educational communities, oral history interviews with government officials, and novel qualitative social media research using WhatsApp, Facebook, Telegram and YouTube to observe cheating in situ, this research asks to what extent digital cheating can be conceptualized not as deviance but as an act of resistance.

Morphing from an individual practice into a social process, digital cheating embodies an emerging collaborative ethic both in assessment and learning. It exemplifies a collective articulation of agency and a creative act of resistance to state-led educational change and unfair structural conditions exacerbated by Covid-19. Within a youth subversive counterculture, students are contesting the meanings, normativity and morality of cheating, forging solidarity and camaraderie, and constructing a shared social identity with an anonymous community of peers. Bringing together the cultural politics of educational change, the sociology and criminology of digital cheating, and social movements and digital activism, this research informs contemporary global discussions on cheating and helps reimagine assessment.

Author

• Hany Zayed, University of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign