The court case against 11 teenagers accused of stealing and circulating school exam papers starts in Rotterdam on Monday.

The 11, nine young men and two young women, are said to have broken into the school and taken 27 papers for last year’s school leaving exams. Most of the stolen papers were for pre-university VWO subjects.

The group are said to have copied the papers and sold them on to other pupils for between €50 and €250, Nos television reports. More than 100 pupils had access to the stolen papers, police say.

Resits

All the pupils at the Ibn Ghaldoun school had to take their school leaving exams for a second time and eight were denied a school leaving certificate despite the resits. The school itself has since been closed down after the education ministry withdrew funding because of its poor performance in general.

The education ministry’s exam board is planning to try to claim €100,000 from the suspects for the cost of reprinting papers, the Volkskrant says.

The court has allocated five days to the hearings. In total, 159 witnesses were questioned during the police investigation.