Teacher and students in a Romanian school
An online dictionary deliberately changed a few of its definitions to the wrong answer to trick Romanian students trying to cheat on a national aptitude test Reuters

The administrators of a popular Romanian dictionary website have admitted that they changed the definitions of certain terms in order to see whether high school students in the country were using its platform to cheat on their national exams.

On Monday 13 March, thousands of secondary students took practice papers to prepare them for the National Evaluation, which is an important exam taken by 14-15-year-olds to test their aptitude and assign them to either science, technical or humanities streams in upper secondary schools.

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The administrators of the Dex online dictionary made an educated guess and decided to deliberately change the definitions of three popular Romanian words that they felt were likely to come up in the exam, according to Romanian news site Republica.

The exam took place between 9-11am EET, and while there were only nine searches for the three terms before 9am, as soon as the exam started, the website began receiving hundreds of requests for two of the phrases.

It turns out that the two terms were included in the examination and students were required to define the meaning of each word, which means that it was highly likely that some pupils were sneakily using mobile devices to access the internet so that they could cheat on the test.