You must have heard of the phrase,

‘Naqal kay liye bhi akal ki zarurat hai’ (you must be sly if you are intending to cheat).

Our education system is rife with cheaters who pass their exams through many unscrupulous means. Be it through smuggling ‘phaaray’ (notes), to outing the paper well before their due date, nothing is left to chance. For such people, hard work and effort means nothing at all.

Combine the above moral with this one:

‘Jhoot k paun nai hotay (the lie has no legs to stand upon)’

Little wonder then that many of us have accepted cheating and lying as a norm of life here despite all the dangers that such an attitude brings to a person in practical life.

But what happens if you combine the two – cheating and lying, and try to get away with it?

Here is a tale of one such student who tried to be smarter than half.

A student of Pharm.D (a future ‘doctor-in-the-making’), Ans Rehman as he is known by his Twitter handle, made this tweet on Aug 21:

Alhamdulilah got 1060/1100 in MDCAT. Got the leaked paper night before. Just spent 5 lacs for this. Thank you Papa!#mdcat2017 — Ans (@Ansupernal) August 21, 2017

Perhaps he didn’t get the memo that Twitter is a public platform. Perhaps he thought he could impress a girl or two by making his boast public. Perhaps he didn’t really care.

As it turns out, he was just being a troll:

But by then it was too late. Some people did notice. People that Ans really didn’t want knocking at his doorstep.

A news channel picked up his tweet and ran a story on it. The authorities also launched an investigation on it.

That’s what you call a facepalm moment. Suffice to say, Ans might have learnt his lesson when it comes to saying stuff over the internet. Because if its on the internet, then it must be true isn’t it?

Perhaps this tweet sums up the whole saga quite nicely.

https://twitter.com/stalker_here2/status/916161889079578624?s=09

But wait, there’s more to this story.

Remember that story about crying wolf? Turns out that Ans’ lie about the paper being leaked out proved to be true, even if it wasn’t apparent at the time.

Just yesterday, after keeping students in the dark for one and a half month regarding their entry test, Punjab Government finally admitted that the f Medical and Dental Colleges Admission Test (MDCAT) was leaked.

They will now have to hold the tests again, free of charge. All affected students are expected to take it again.

“The investigations, conducted so far, have revealed involvement of an organised racket having close links with some of the doctors, non-doctors and renowned academies that offered services for preparation of the entrance test,” said Khawaja Salman Rafique, Minister for Specialised Healthcare and Medical Education,.

The test, which is now considered as invalid, was conducted on Aug 20 2016 at the University of Health Sciences (UHS).

Once news about the leak went viral, many parents and students protested against it.