AMMAN — A group of
students have submitted “dozens” of forged equivalency certificates to the
Unified Admissions Department at the Ministry of Higher Education for
enrollment at Jordanian universities this year.
اضافة اعلان
In an interview with
Jordan News, Muhannad Al-Khatib, media spokesperson for the Ministry of Higher
Education, said that this is the first time this year that such forgeries have
been discovered.
Students applying for university in Jordan must submit their secondary
school certificates to the Recognition and Certificates Equivalency Directorate
at the ministry. The directorate then issues students with equivalency
certificates that they then submit as part of their application for admission
to a Jordanian university.
Staff at the Unified
Admissions Coordination Unit found a number of suspect or incorrect
certificates among those they received recently from
students applying for
admission to local universities. The certificates were sent to the ministry
which confirmed they were not issued by the equivalency directorate.
“This is the first time
that we have observed such an attempt this year. We rechecked all equivalency
certificates that were presented to us to ensure that they were issued
correctly due to the sensitivity of this matter,” Khatib said. He said that based
on this certificate a student may be accepted to university. If such a
certificate is forged as in this case, the student submitting is taking someone
else’s place at university.
“These applications
have been canceled and not counted towards admission, and we referred those who
submitted them to the public prosecutor to take legal action as needed on charges
of using forged documents,” Khatib said of the students who submitted the
forged certificates.
“When issuing letters
of acceptance to universities we ask universities not to complete the acceptance
procedures of these students before they submit all the original documents duly
certified, and thus the probability of forgery is zero percent,” he said.
Samih Khreis, a lawyer,
said that forgery is altering the truth or distorting a certain document: “From
what we know about the forgery of secondary school equivalency documents, we
assume that they made a document in the name of the Ministry of Higher
Education, meaning that it was not issued by the real concerned authority, which
they submitted to the Unified Admissions Department as the real document.”
“If this is what
happened, then it is considered criminal fraud. The perpetrator of this act is subject
to legal accountability before the criminal court on charges of forging
official documents. This is not a simple matter at all, and its consequences
are big.”
When Khreis was asked
about the possible penalties for this felony, he said: “The penalty for
criminal forgery of official papers is a minimum of three years in prison with
hard labor if the suspect is found guilty.”
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