Thai students are ingenious in their quest to pass exams and why shouldn’t they be? They come from a culture of enterprise and innovation that stretches back over a thousand years. It is in their genes — and jeans, as you are about to learn.
As long as lecturers have been devising examinations, students have been devising ways to circumvent the tedious process of having to know stuff to pass. This is not peculiarly Thai, but in this country they do take it to another level.
I am guilty of it as much as anybody else. I am a graduate of Ramkhamhaeng University, and I once wrote PSTBUE on my wrist prior to one of my Thai History finals.
It was the first letter of each king of the late Ayutthaya period. Being slightly autistic, compulsive-obsessive or just plain lunatic (I can hear a song from the 1970s and tell you what year it was popular, maybe even the month), I was able to learn all the relevant dates and information about each esteemed king of that era. My problem was I couldn’t remember the order.
It took an agonising few hours, not to mention at least two full lemons sliced up and sunk into gin and tonics, to decide I would cheat. I am not proud, dear reader, but vocalising one’s shameful acts, at least according to one psychologist I spent 50 minutes with before an alarm went off, is one way of atoning for one’s guilt. Ah, but we are off the track.
My attempt at cheating was not only pathetic. It was also a failure. My nervousness at getting caught resulted in an excess amount of perspiration in the vicinity of my wrist, resulting in my cryptic succession of capital letters being all but obliterated by my cheap Chatuchak imitation leather watchband. Luckily the test questions centred around King Ekkathat, the very last king, whom I had an affinity with because he was scheming and lustful and had prominent skin rashes. Such traits tend to stick in my mind; I passed the test.
My attempt was prehistoric compared to a news story back in the early 1990s that caught my attention involving test time at an inner-city university.
Students concocted a truly amazing way to pass a difficult test. The examination room looked out over a block of nondescript government flats. The students sat in seats right next to the windows.
Somehow or other, the correct answers to the multiple-choice test were conveyed to an outside source. In one apartment a clothes line was rigged up. For the next two hours, a woman hung out the washing, which to anybody else’s eyes would have appeared innocent enough.
The thing is, she was hanging out clothes in code.
A red shirt, for example, meant the correct answer was A. Purple spotted underwear meant the answer was B. A yellow dress represented C, and blue jeans were D. And so, these clothes were systematically hung up, then taken down, then hung up again a total of 100 times.
An eagle-eyed lecturer patrolling the examination room happened to notice the clothes being swapped, and the ruse fell apart quickly with police and the media called in. It was big news at the time and quite rightfully so, because it revealed something amazing, and I’m not talking about the fact a person would choose to wear purple spotted underwear. It exposed the ingenuity of Thais.
Times change, and hanging out the washing as a means of cheating is as prehistoric now as my sad attempt was. We are in a different world to the early 1990s, in which we can document every millisecond for all the world to see, and we fool ourselves into thinking the world really wants to see it. Advances in technology mean cameras no longer have to be surreptitiously clipped to polyester collars of disco shirts. There are cameras that can fit into your eye like contact lenses. Purple-spotted underwear and blue jeans have become obsolete in our quest to cut academic corners.
The scandal over at Rangsit University this past week, where an elaborate cheating system was foiled, gives us a glimpse into how far we have advanced technologically in our desire to cheat. The ingredients involved cameras embedded in eyeglasses, smart watches through which correct answers would be transmitted, and numbskull rich kids each with an idle 800,000 baht to spare.
This was an exam to get into Rangsit University’s medical school. Much has been said about the technological aspect of the cheating, but actually, we should be paying more attention to the methodical mapping out of the scheme. Because let’s face it; it was extraordinarily astute.
I try to imagine the conspiratorial backroom brainstorming prior to the event. This scheme required an expert in medical knowledge, an expert in computer technology and a savvy business operator. Now we all know business operators are not necessarily intelligent; some inherit, others are just plain lucky, while others are simply psychopathic. But the first two had to be clever people, or rather, brilliant in circumventing the system.
To top it all off — what they did wasn’t even illegal. Sure the cops are trying to establish if the equipment entered the country illegally. If it did, then they are subject to a fine for — gasp — minor tax evasion. The audacity of the crime itself, that is, cheating to get into medical school, remains the domain of the university and the Medical Council of Thailand.
(Last Tuesday the superintendent of the Park Khlong Rangsit cop shop took this one step further; he expressed concern about the besmirching of the names of the three students who were willing to pay in excess of 800,000 baht apiece to cheat their way into medical school, since they hadn’t been charged with any crime. “Their futures may be adversely affected,” he announced. Well … yes. What other way would we want their futures to be? Practising medicine?)
Recently I was in Sukhothai. I went there for Songkran, to visit the historical sights of the former kingdom of 800 years ago. It was a wonderful trip. I will ignore the fact I was there the day Sukhothai registered a temperature of 44C, making it the hottest place in Thailand. Everything else was wonderful.
On the way there I spent a day at King Narai’s Palace in Lop Buri, which is a great day trip from Bangkok. One thing that surprised me was the elaborate system of aqueducts in the palace. Some 500 years ago, the Siamese had worked out an irrigation system that was in place, working and well ahead of its time.
Then I reached Sukhothai Historical Park at sundown, and watched the sun slowly melt behind the ruins of Wat Mahathat and Wat Sa Si. It is one of the most beautiful sights you will see in Thailand, a combination of innovative architecture and the elegance of the Buddhist statues. It is breathtaking in its artistry.
The aqueducts, the architecture, the artistry. “Those Siamese were amazing in their creativity and thoughts back then,” I said out loud to my two Thai companions as the sun disappeared.
One of them laughed derisively. “So what happened to us?” he quipped.
I begged to differ. Thais are still clever, I said. I mean, look at that system that involved spotted purple underwear and a washing line. Look at the Rangsit University scheme of the past week. The brilliant thought processes remain to this day, albeit diverted in a direction that aims to shortcut rather than develop. Now if we could just add an element of ethics to the innovation — Eureka! n
This source first appeared on Bangkok Post Lifestyle.