Word has leaked that the Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia history paper suffered an embarrassing fissure earlier this week.
Caught off guard by media reports, the Education Ministry was understandably miffed and anxious as the minister immediately ordered an official probe.
But here's how it probably happened: the leak obviously originated from a rogue student who surreptitiously used a smartphone to snap images of the history paper, thereby making the leak traceable.
The police cyber unit will be able to secure the authentic image, track its Internet protocol digital footprint to the smartphone's SIM card and, with it, identify the culprit. Which makes the student who snapped the paper and distributed it a dunce risking criminal prosecution.
Smartphones are rightly banned in examination halls. Students have been caught red-handed, thus forfeiting their entire examination.
The logical assumption is, there could be similar conspiracies, but one "shared" exclusively within a "trusted" few. However, the question is, why bother?
It makes no sense to leak an SPM paper because there is no advantage. Students nationwide sit for a specific paper at the exact same time, so a leak after the fact makes this cloak-and-dagger effort pointless.
Unless the leaker, after covertly snapping the paper complete with legibly written answers, stealthily uploads the image for fellow students to just as covertly copy the answers in real time.
Probably more adept at tackling the paper, the leaker may have been entrusted with the covert deed to "help" his mates. Or the leaker was just out to make a handsome fee. Or it could have been done on a silly dare.
This is stretching the complexities of the examination process. But while the covertness takes some doing, the motives can't be overlooked.
If the incentives are lucrative and seductive, rogue students tend to be "resourceful" in evading invigilators' roving eyes.
Leaked examination papers are advantageous, but only if there is a clear time lag that can be profitably exploited. One example: students sitting for professional London-based examinations in Kuala Lumpur, say, at 9am today, can conveniently pass the questions to students sitting for the same paper at 9am, but hours later, armed with finely tuned answers.
This actually occurred years ago. To tackle it, the examination body synchronised testing fixtures or handed out different sets of questions in other regions.
We can only marvel at or be contemptuous of this audacity to circumvent the strictures of examination governance.
While parents are fixated on universities' admissions to guarantee their children's enrolment and students cheat tests as a means of advancement, they cannot hope to progress further now because sophisticated tracking algorithms have nullified efforts at fraud and plagiarism.
In the meantime, society might try to ease up on placing a heavy premium on examinations and lofty degrees. These intense expectations only propel politicians, corporate executives and social climbers to falsify and pad up their academically thin resumes to clamber up the real, or imagined, hierarchy.