Cockroach Janta party supporters in Mumbai, India, celebrate the resignation of the education minister following protests over an exam paper leak that affected millions of students. Photograph: Indranil Aditya/Reuters View image in fullscreen Cockroach Janta party supporters in Mumbai, India, celebrate the resignation of the education minister following protests over an exam paper leak that affected millions of students. Photograph: Indranil Aditya/Reuters Global education AI cheating, leaked papers and marking errors: how exam protests went global Student unrest sweeps India, Portugal and Mexico as grievances and pressure for good grades in tough job market collide
About this content Deborah Solomon and Oliver Holmes Sun 16 Aug 2026 09.00 CEST Last modified on Sun 16 Aug 2026 09.01 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google F amilies with teenagers in education know the private, hidden pain of exam season. But this year, what might have been a summer of quiet family anxiety has erupted in several countries into public unrest.
Exam-related turmoil has led to mass student protests in Mexico after nearly 60,000 university applicants were forced to resit tests amid suspected cheating , while Portugal’s disastrous attempt to digitise school exam marking sparked the country’s worst education crisis in decades.
By far the largest and most ground-shaking incident was in India, however, where an exam paper leak affected millions of students and was linked to more than a dozen students taking their own lives. The scandal forced the education minister to resign , and challenged the government’s hold over its 1.4 billion citizens.
Why does this exam season seem to be particularly tense and volatile? Experts say the growth of AI cheating and attempts by academic institutions to digitise examinations are at the heart of the issue. When coupled with the high stakes of good grades in an increasingly precarious global economy, the result can be explosive.
Read more “It would seem that exams are getting more fraught on a global scale,” said Dr Sarah Eaton of the Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary. “The pressure on young people has absolutely changed.
“We’ve seen the economic situation change around the world in the last decade. And the results of one examination determining a person’s entire future really creates untenable pressure on young people,” said Eaton, a leading expert on academic ethics. “This is a tragedy when young people are dying by suicide because of an examination outcome.”
View image in fullscreen Student applicants of the National Autonomous University of Mexico protest over the retake of the admission exam. Photograph: Jose Luis Torales/NurPhoto/Shutterstock When a single test can determine a young person’s entire future, cheating is no longer just about individuals but becomes a systematic issue, said Eaton. This is compounded when illicit commercial industries, known as the “education mafia”, exploit student desperation by stealing and then selling exam papers, something that has become widespread in India and elsewhere.
Students from across India joined the mass demonstrations led by the Cockroach Janta party , a youth-led protest campaign that began as an online satirical joke and grew into a nationwide outcry that poses an unprecedented challenge to Narendra Modi’s government.
“When you get large-scale fraud combined with systemic failure, there’s almost a guarantee of a breakdown of public trust,” s…