Sunday February 4th. 9.30 in the morning. Classroom 16 of the Faculty of Informatics of the Complutense University of Madrid. Part of the 10,182 candidates who aspire to obtain one of the 726 places for assistants in Penitentiary Institutions offered by the Ministry of the Interior have been taking the first of the tests for about half an hour, a multiple choice exam with 120 questions. Suddenly, the silence of the room is broken by a voice that gives the correct answers to the questions: “44 C, 45 A…” The resulting commotion increases when those in charge of controlling the development of the test address towards the supposed origin of the speech and ask a young woman who is doing the exercise to leave the classroom. The expelled woman wears a small earpiece in her ear hidden under her hair which, when disconnected from the mobile phone that she also carries irregularly, is what caused the speaker of the latter device to activate and the responses to be heard.
The commotion continues for a few more minutes when it is detected that she is not the only one who is allegedly cheating. Other people who carry mobile phones are also kicked out of the classroom despite the ban. In total, a dozen people – two for using earpieces and another 10 for having their cell phones on – have their exam interrupted and are forced to leave the classrooms during the day, as confirmed by sources from Penitentiary Institutions. The tests were held in Madrid (where 9,655 candidates attended) and Las Palmas (where 527 candidates attended).
The incident has provoked an avalanche of criticism from opponents. A video has been spread through the social network TikTok of less than a minute about what is described as a “scandal.” The instant messaging application chats used by those who have taken the exam have also served to show, in recent days, their discomfort over what happened. “It has been a disaster,” one of the opponents complained through a voice recording in which she pointed out that she had lost concentration and had even started crying because of what had happened. “One from the court came and she told me, 'don't worry, the exam may be cancelled.' […] Everything has been crazy, like a movie,” he added when describing his experience.
One of the prison unions, Tu Abandono Me Podemos Matar (TAMPM), issued a press release in which it criticized the “poor organization” of the tests with a “significant delay” in the beginning of the tests, as well as the alleged inequalities in the development of the exam depending on the classroom as some are allowed to carry the cell phone “in airplane mode” [sin posibilidad de recibir tráfico de datos]” and use it during breaks, and in others it would be prohibited to have them. This union also refers to the earring incident. “The commotion that formed at that moment was, as can be imagined, serious, causing those present to lose concentration and lose motivation (even doubting whether or not to continue taking the exam), as well as distrust in the cleanliness of the process and uncertainty in never knowing how many of them will have managed to pass the test in this way.” TAMPM calls on the Interior to adopt measures in the future, such as the obligation for opponents who have long hair to tie it back so that they cannot hide listening devices in their ears and the removal of all mobile phones.
It is not the first time that the opposition to the corps of assistants in Penitentiary Institutions has been involved in controversy. In January of last year, the civil servants' unions showed their discomfort at the statement of two practical cases of the exam carried out a few weeks before, considering that they undermined their image by reflecting fictitious cases in which they committed crimes. In one of them, the applicants were presented with a situation in which the worker trafficked drugs inside the prison. The second described an episode of mistreatment of a prisoner. Then, the unions demanded that the Interior draft practical assumptions on the disciplinary regime in the future “that do not represent a new attempt to tarnish the image of the group.”
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