The price for examinations questions went up from a phone card to a whopping SR3,000, said a student who has unmasked a foreign professor's previous involvement in bribery. Riyadh's King Saud University (KSU) has suspended the Egyptian professor at its Faculty of Tourism and Antiquities after student Ashraf Al-Sarani revealed that the professor was the same man he helped bring to justice eight years ago for selling examination questions to students at the Technical College in Madina. The professor used coded language to make a deal, Al-Sarani said. A SR100 phone card could buy some general information of an exam, but the more cards received, the more of the exam was revealed, he added. The professor could not handle the flow of phone cards so he made a business of it by selling it to fellow professors. But the price tag of an exam booklet was fixed at SR3,000. He made so much money, it helped him buy a coupe car and rent a nice house. Most of the students who could not afford the price ended up with a “lovely F” or failing grades in the professor's courses, Al-Sarani added. The professor's illegal solicitation increased when it was time for students to receive their monthly stipends, he said. Al-Sarani and some of his classmates could not take it anymore and took the case to the dean, but this did not help much. They then reported the matter to the authorities. The secret police asked Al-Sarani to negotiate a deal with the professor to buy the exam, so that they could trap him. “The professor asked for SR3,000 and the police gave me the money,” he said. “I had an appointment with him at Sultana market. While he was receiving the money after giving me the questions, the police arrested him,” he added. “When I asked the dean how things were going with the professor who was demanding money from students, he told me that everything was just fine,” Al-Sarani said. But the dean was surprised when he was told that the professor was taken to prison, just next door from the college. Another Egyptian professor, a friend of the jailed one, was angry at Al-Sarani and his classmates, burdening them with homework, tough exams, and even promises of failure. “The pressure was too much and I had to talk to the police again,” Al-Sarani added. The officer visited the college and talked to both the dean and the professor, who then changed his tone. When he was completing his Master's degree in tourism abroad, Al-Sarani looked to find more information on tourism departments in the Kingdom and to his surprise found his old jailed professor profiled as a faculty member at KSU. When he returned to the Kingdom, he did more research on the professor and his old case and submitted it to authorities, moving KSU to suspend his service pending further investigations. The professor could not answer most questions. “What can I say?” was all he said when he was approached for a comment. He did not even include in his CV his employment period in Madina. But he admitted that his contract in Madina was terminated because of a police investigation. “Now I think I am finished,” he said.
