A year after Iraqi officials ordered the shutdown of the Internet in nearly a quarter of the country to restrict the ISIS from communications, the government ordered a complete shutdown of Internet services in the country for three hours on Saturday. The outage began at 5.00 am and lasted until 8:00 am, according to the Egypt-based Arabic news service El Hadas, and corresponded with “the start of the sixth grade preparatory exams,” the national tests for entry into junior high school. In Iraq, education is compulsory for all students up to the sixth-grade level and those who fail to score well in exams at the end of the sixth year generally don’t continue to the next academic level.
With this kind of high-pressure testing, the motivation for cheating is high as well—so high that the government decided to shut down Internet access to prevent parents or others from remotely assisting students during the exams.
