Fourteen school officials and parents in Egypt were sentenced this week to up to 15 years in jail for their roles in leaking university entrance examinations in a scandal that has gripped this country this summer, Agence France Presse reported.

In June angry parents and high-school students flooded into the streets to protest after news emerged that a group had tried to cheat on the notorious thanawiya amma, the annual series of exams that high-school seniors take to determine placement at university.

A court in the town of Menya, 150 miles south of Cairo, found an examination official, a headmaster, a police officer, and a handful of parents guilty of “having organized leaks, which damaged the principle of equality of opportunity between pupils.” Both the English and the mathematics portions of the exam were leaked, the news agency reported.

The exams are similar to the SAT and carry extremely high stakes because they give even the poorest Egyptian students a shot at a college education. In Egyptian public universities, tuition is free for those who qualify, but there are places for only a tiny proportion of the country’s 800,000 high-school seniors.

Earlier this summer, angry parents, teachers, students, and newspaper columnists demanded that students be given an opportunity to retake the exam, arguing that its integrity had been compromised nationwide. However, the Egyptian public prosecutor said the problem was limited to Menya, and students were not given another chance to take the exam. —Andrew Mills