The Grenoble Headscarf Cheating Controversy Won’t Stop Nudging At Me
I was mid-sip of my too-oat-y oat latte when I saw the story pop up on my feed last week. My friend Lila, who did her master’s at Grenoble Ecole de Management back when I was on exchange there, shared it with a big middle finger emoji and a caption that just said “disgusting”. I had to zoom out and read the whole thing, and my latte went cold on the counter while I did. For anyone who hasn’t heard: two female students were caught cheating on final exams earlier this semester, hiding bluetooth earpieces under their headscarves. Instead of just punishing the two people who broke the rules, GEM implemented a new policy: any student wearing a head covering that covers the whole head has to step aside for a manual pat-down check of the garment before entering the exam hall. The catch? Baseball caps, beanies, hoods, none of those get the same mandatory check. That’s the double standard everyone’s talking about, and I can’t stop picking at it.
I remember exam season at GEM really clearly. It was always freezing in the exam halls, because the admin cranked the AC way too high for some reason, even in the middle of winter when it was already snowing on the Alps outside. Half the guys in my cohort wore baseball caps to every exam, mostly because they pulled all-nighters and had terrible bed head they didn’t bother fixing. No one ever blinked an eye. I wore a fuzzy gray beanie to my microeconomics final because I had a splitting migraine and the fluorescent lights made it worse, and the proctor just smiled and offered me a paracetamol, didn’t ask me to take it off, didn’t pull me aside to check my head. I even saw a guy once get caught with a cheat sheet tucked in the band of his baseball cap a couple years ago, and no one suggested that all baseball caps should be mandatory checked after that. They just kicked that one guy out and moved on.
What’s different here, obviously, is that these cheaters were wearing headscarves. Religious headscarves, worn by Muslim women. And in France, where there’s already this constant, simmering backlash against any visible sign of religion in public spaces, especially Islam, suddenly the garment becomes the problem, not the cheating.
Wait, let me get this straight first: I think cheating is garbage. If you pay to cheat your way through a business degree, you’re stealing a spot from someone who worked their ass off to get there, and you’re gonna go out into the world and work a job you’re not qualified for, that’s garbage. Those two students should face whatever penalty the school hands out, that’s fair. But why does every single other student who wears a headscarf on campus have to be punished for what those two did?
Lila went to the small on-campus protest about this a couple weeks ago, she told me the whole thing over WhatsApp while we were waiting for our respective busses yesterday. She said one of the school administrators came out to talk to the group, kept repeating that it was just a “neutral policy for exam integrity”, that they weren’t targeting anyone. Then a 22-year-old student named Samira, who wears a hijab and has been at GEM for three years without a single mark against her, asked him why baseball caps weren’t subject to the same mandatory check. He just shrugged and said “there’s never been an incident of cheating with a baseball cap”, which is such a lie. Everyone who’s ever taken a university exam knows people cheat with everything: notes on the back of hands, notes in water bottle labels, tiny earpieces hidden under any kind of head covering. The only difference is that baseball caps are worn by “regular” people, and headscarves are worn by the “other” that everyone already loves to scapegoat.
The most awkward part, Samira told Lila later, is that the check happens right by the door, in front of everyone going into the exam. Everyone stops and stares, you have to stand there while a staff member runs their hand along the edge of your headscarf to check for devices. It’s humiliating. My cousin, who wears a hijab and studies in Lyon, told me that after this story broke, her own professor made her lift the edge of her hijab at the front of the lecture hall before her midterm last month. She said her face was burning the whole time, everyone was looking, and she just wanted to leave. If she’d refused, what would have happened? They’d have kicked her out for not following the rule, right? No one asks a guy with a baseball cap to lift the back of his cap in front of the whole class. That just doesn’t happen.
GEM loves to brag about how diverse and inclusive it is, right? Their whole website is full of photos of students from all over the world, talks about welcoming people from every background, how they prepare future leaders to work in a global economy. That’s the other half of the double standard that makes me so mad. They get to check all the diversity boxes for their rankings, they get to collect tuition from international Muslim students, but when there’s one tiny incident, they throw all those students under the bus to appease the right-wing crowd that’s already screaming about banning hijabs everywhere.
I don’t have some big neat solution to this, I’m just some person who had a friend who went there and can see how unfair it is. I know some people will say “well if they don’t want to be checked, they can just take it off for the exam” but that’s such a garbage take. That’s like saying “if you don’t want to be stopped and searched by police, don’t walk around while Black”. It blames the person for being who they are, instead of blaming the school for making a cruel, unfair rule.
I keep thinking of Aisha, a girl I met on exchange back in 2019 who wore a hijab and studied marketing at GEM. She grew up in a tiny working-class town outside Paris, her parents cleaned offices and drove taxis to put her through prep school, she worked two part-time jobs on top of her classes to pay her tuition. She told me once that she’s always scared people think she only got into GEM because of a quota, that they think she doesn’t deserve her spot there. Can you imagine how this rule makes her feel? Every time she walks into an exam, already stressed out about passing, she has to stop and be publicly searched, just for what she wears.
It doesn’t matter how many times GEM calls this a neutral policy. It’s not neutral. Double standards never are. This isn’t about stopping cheating. It’s about targeting a group of people who are already used to being targeted, and that’s the part that just won’t sit right with me, no matter what anyone says. I don’t know if they’ll change the rule. I hope they do, but I doubt it. This fits too neatly into everything that’s already going on. I just keep thinking about that walk to the exam hall, the cold air off the mountains, the weight of everyone’s eyes on you before you even sit down to start the test. That’s the cost of this double standard, and it’s not the cheaters who are paying it.
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