Thank goodness! Donna had spent a sleepless night worrying about her Geography GCSEThe national exams taken by 15 and 16-year-olds in parts of the UK. . She had fallen behind during the pandemic and never caught up. But here was a way out: someone offering a sneak preview of the paper on TikTok. She quickly messaged them and found out the price: £20. A bargain! She paid the money and waited for the paper to come through... but it never did.

Donna was the victim of a quickly spreading scam - but she could have lost far more money. Some fraudsters are asking up to £4,000 for what they say are leaked GCSE and A-levelThe national exams taken by 17 and 18-year-olds in parts of the UK. A-level grades are used to determine university places. papers.

One student told the BBC that she had been quoted £500 for a GCSE paper: "I was taken aback because it was ridiculous prices."

"The people who buy from these accounts are your most desperate students," she added. "These accounts are actually very clever and sneaky in what they do - preying on this vulnerability."

A BBC team posed as a student and contacted an Instagram account which offered an exam paper for £150. "After paying the agreed fee, our messages were ignored and no paper was sent to us," they reported. "The scammer's social media account was then deleted."

Some fraudsters do send through papers - but not the right ones. They simply take an old paper and change the date and text on the front cover.

Cases of real papers being leaked are extremely rare, but students seldom realise this. And though efforts are being made to combat the scammers, the head of one exam board describes the process as "digital whack-a-mole". As soon as a social-media company closes down one fake account, another one opens up.

The pandemic has increased the temptation to cheat: because many students have never sat an exam, they feel particularly nervous. But anyone caught can be disqualified from an exam or barred from sitting exams completely.

Even before Covid-19, some people went to extraordinary lengths to cheat. In India parents have climbed ladders to pass information to their children through exam-room windows.

In China some schools have installed metal detectors to stop smartphones from being smuggled in.¹ Students have been caught with hidden earphones, smartwatches and T-shirts with radio receivers sewn into them.

Parents have been known to pay people with forged ID cards to sit exams in their children's place. China has now introduced a law that makes cheating punishable by up to seven years in prison.

But there has long been a debate about whether exams are a good idea at all. Some claim that they are more a test of memory than of anything else. And students can become so stressed that they fail to do themselves justice.  

It is also argued that exams have distorted the education system, so that the emphasis is on how to get good grades rather than learning in a wider way.

On the other hand, supporters of exams say course work cannot always be trusted because it is so easy for students to copy material from the internet or ask their parents to do the work for them.

Yes: They just give a snapshot of what students have in their heads at a particular time, rather than measuring true ability. It is much better to judge people by course work done over a long period.

No: Whatever you do in life, it will involve applying knowledge under pressure, so exams are a vital preparation for that. Course work allows too much room for cheating by getting outside help.

Or... Exams are here to stay, whether you like it or not. The arrival of ChatGPTAn Artificial Intelligence chatbot released in November 2022. has alarmed schools and universities so much that they are starting to put extra emphasis on written and oral exams.