On the morning of Friday June 6, Law students had been gearing up for one of their biggest exams of Semester One, LAWS407 Company Law. A couple of hours before the exam, however, they received an email from the University advising that following a breach of academic conduct, they’d been forced to make the “difficult decision” to postpone the exam. Cue carnage.
Whistleblowers had tipped the University off that the contents of the examination had been leaked the night prior through a Snapchat group chat. In one of campus’ biggest scandals this year, there seemed to be a different version of events whispered across every table of Auahi Ora and in friend group chats.
Critic Te Ārohi heard from an Otago Uni spokesperson for their official account of events. “The student, who had been granted permission to sit the Company Law examination early due to a challenging exam timetable, signed a confidentiality agreement as a condition of this arrangement. This student was a member of a study group, established several weeks prior, to prepare for the examination. The study group was using a group chat app, and the student made an unsolicited disclosure about the examination to peers via a group chat the night before the scheduled exam sitting.”
Other sources disagreed slightly with the University’s version of the story. Some who Critic Te Ārohi spoke to are claiming that the student who took the exam early told a friend of the content of the exam, who then put that information into a group chat. Regardless, the exam content was out of the bag. News of this leak soon reached the Law faculty, at which point the exam was postponed, an academic conduct investigation was launched, and you couldn’t step foot on campus without hearing about it.
Affected Law students told Critic Te Ārohi that it took a serious toll on an already stressed bunch. One student described to Critic how their “initial relief” at the email quickly turned to “frustration and annoyance”. It was their biggest exam, having spent the vast majority of their study dedicated to preparing, including sacrificing study time for a business exam the following morning, deciding it was worth it. “But then that exam was cancelled leaving my weeks of prep redundant and me wondering why I even bothered. I could have easily used this time for my other papers. The idea that someone else’s idiotic actions led to my entire exam season being uprooted was extremely infuriating.”
Another student called the cancellation “nothing short of a large disruption” and the lack of notice “crippling”. They too had gambled with their study time and opted to prioritise LAWS407 – study that went to waste. Students had heard rumours of a take-home exam which didn’t come to fruition, instead being given the option of different dates further in the future to sit the exam. “It impacted my break in the sense that it extended the stressful exam period into a time where I was supposed to be relaxing and spending time with my family. Instead I was deviated from this by the threat of an upcoming exam,” a third Law student told Critic.
The student who caused the disruption “recognises they have made a serious error of judgement, is remorseful and has apologised for the disruption they have caused, both to their peers and the faculty,” said the Uni. It wasn’t just the leaker who faced trouble from the Uni overlords. The spokesperson also confirmed to Critic that students who received the disclosed information and failed to report the breach were investigated as well. Any failure to report the leak was found to be “inconsistent with the University’s academic integrity policy and misconduct findings have been made in relation to these students”.
Likely being keen to get over the scandal, the Faculty of Law Dean Bridgette Toy-Cronin told Critic, “Now that the investigation has concluded and appropriate actions have been taken, I have asked the students to move forward with a shared commitment to integrity, respect and growth.” While tauira may be concerned about their exams getting leaked in the future, the Uni also told Critic that they have “25 years of data that suggests significant gaps do not exist in the [exam] processes” to prevent a similar leak occurring again. For now at least, the dust has settled (on the scandal, not the unopened law textbooks). Critic is excited to see what joke they make about this in Law Revue later this year.