In Sweden, as in numerous other countries, national tests are common in contemporary education. Over the last few years, the national tests have leaked in Sweden, which has been reported by the Swedish National Agency for Education and mainstream media. This article, based on a part of a more comprehensive study, explores and provides knowledge about how students in a Swedish municipal lower secondary school respond to leaked materials relating to national tests, and includes an analysis from a students' perspective of the rationales students provide to justify their reactions. Students in one school class were interviewed their last year of compulsory school (aged 15). In 13 individual interviews and three group interviews, the students talked about national tests being extensively leaked nationwide and how they shared pictures of leaked materials in the class Snapchat group. This enabled some students to practice beforehand and score better, while a few students dissociated themselves from the leaks. The leaked materials were regarded as the knowledge requirements for compulsory school, and the leaks seemed to be unproblematic for most of the students.

In contemporary ways of thinking about education there is an enhanced focus on individual students’ results and less on students’ collaborative processes for attaining good results. This may appear peculiar, given that the Swedish curriculum for the nine-year compulsory school states that students should be given opportunities to compose texts together with others and give and receive feedback on them. This is also in line with societal desires to motivate students to take responsibility for their lifelong learning. The evolving ethnographic research design, comprising observations, audio-visual recordings and follow-up interviews with students at a Swedish lower secondary school (Years 8 and 9), investigated the informal social strategies that students enacted when doing formal schoolwork and how they reflected on them. Goffman’s (1959/1990) dramaturgical metaphors of the back region, front region and impression management were applied as theoretical points of departure. The findings showed that some students worked hard at their schoolwork in ways that corresponded with societal desires and ideal learning curves. Other students aimed at more effortless achievements and relied heavily on peers and digital devices when taking shortcuts to produce formal assignments. These students’ potential learning curves showed a broken arrow of knowledge development, resulting in assessment dilemmas for teachers and possible mismatches in their grading. 

This ethnographic study in education, based on observations, audio-visual recordings and interviews, explored pupils' supportive interactions in a year eight class at a Swedish school. Goffman's dramaturgical theory of the presentation of self was used as a theoretical framework with a focus on the pupils' interactions with their classmates in backstage spaces when they prepare performances in the form of writing assignments to be handed in to teachers. Some pupils took responsibility for having an assignment to hand in to teachers, but not for their learning process in planning their work and writing the assignment themselves, in line with the formal requirements of a goal-oriented school system. The findings showed that pupils applied informal social strategies when managing formal individual assignments. Some examples of these strategies were: swapping computers with classmates during lessons and writing for peers, logging in to peers' Google Classroom accounts and writing for them, and forwarding pictures of completed written assignments to peers to be reformulated in their peers' "own words". The intention of these interactions was to portray a favourable impression of themselves and their abilities to the assessing teachers. The pupils' strategies tended to reinforce classic socially reproductive patterns and generate inequalities between pupils; pupils with higher levels of social and economic capital seemed to profit more and achieve better grades than others. These informal networking strategies co-existed with, and were in opposition to, the formal school context, and were difficult for teachers to detect due to their taking place backstage, out of teachers' sight.