York professor seeks to chronicle exam cheating from centuries past to today

Less than a decade after Confederation, the newly created province of Ontario was hit by several academic scandals in the mid-1870s, with revelations that exam papers for the certification of schoolteachers were stolen or illicitly unsealed, copied, then sold on the black market.

Fast-forward to our time, when the Law Society of Ontario found out that copies of its licensing exam had been leaked to a tutoring agency. The legal regulator suspected that 150 wannabe lawyers had “engaged in prohibited actions” when they were tested in the fall of 2021.