Cheating is OK so What is Your Problem Anyway?

Cheating is OK so what is your problem anyway? In Thailand, cheating is the status quo. How can the west do business with Thailand when their culture has no ethics and is amoral?

"I am an 'A' student, it says so right there on my transcripts! Who cares that I graduated from an English university and I cannot speak English, read it or write it!" Unfortunately here in Thailand, not many do care. Having a university degree use to say something about a person, it use to say that you completed something, that you worked toward and successfully attained a level of education that satisfies educational standards qualifying you the honor of having a degree bestowed upon you. Having a piece of paper in Thailand that says you graduated from an accredited university means nothing and is used to weed out people that do not have one in the pursuit of a getting a higher paying job and even that is not guaranteed.

It could mean that you have a higher quality of education but that is more than often not the case here in Thailand. For the most part what it means is that you are better at cheating. Cheating has become an epidemic in Thailand. How students cheat has become more advanced and even though how you prevent cheating has also been giving more advanced high tech tools to help fight it, lax standards from university professors have actually become worse than in the past.

Cheating has infiltrated all educational institutions in Thailand in every industry. In a military academy entrance exam 46 men were caught using mobile phones strapped to their legs and hidden in their pants. Thailand is not alone in this epidemic; however, Asia tends to be on the forefront of pushing cheating to extremes. Miniature mics and speakers are sewn into shirt cuffs and hidden in to wigs. Fake IDs are sold at ridiculous prices that enable someone capable of passing the exams to take them as a proxy for the 'customer'.

Of course, the standard 'cheat notes' typed on a piece of paper have been improved with technology by photocopying the notes to a reduced state that is hardly legible. These notes are passed around among classmates or even sold by vendors close to the school. According to the exam, whether a national exam or medical exam the sale of the exam is quite lucrative to vendors with some making as much as $1 million US.

Another technique is the 'look alike' student who sits in place of the paying customer. There are actually agencies online that offer this service. Just Google it, "look alike students to take exams". This query returned over 200,000 results. Another problem is the selling of last terms, courses, or last year's exam questions. Is this wrong? Personally, I do not think it is. Why would an educator give the same tests or exams month after month, term after term, year after year, unless they themselves suck!

Plagiarism has never flourished as it does now. The internet and cell phone technology has been tailored made for this it seems. A quick Google of 'cheat notes' returns over 9.5 million hits. Phone companies are offering services that provide summaries of anything quickly retrieved by your cell phone.

There is a lack of morals and ethics that is at the root of this epidemic and who is to blame other than society itself with our corrupt culture, politicians, military and law enforcement agencies not to mention business in general. How can we actually expect our university students to display ethics and morals when not only society but the very universities they study at lack them? Surveys show that over 70% of students cheat. You might find this number high. Having taking 30 or 40 final exams in the past few years, I can personally attest to the fact that this numbers is low. Not only have I witnessed mass cheating in university final exams, I have witnessed university professors catching students cheating and asking them to stop. "Please do not do that." I hope this shocks you as much as it shocks me. It makes me sick. I work hard to get the marks I earn only to have some dimwit make the same or similar mark as I which totally demoralizes me, renders my mark useless as these non-attentive incompetent students are nothing more than an embarrassment to me as colleagues. This very culture, that in which 'everyone does it' not only exists but is not only accepted by my peer group but accepted by the professors and administrators of the universities of Thailand.

In other parts of the world where cheating is actually frowned upon administrators have gone to some incredible lengths to prevent it. Scrambling cell phones around testing areas, electronic finger printing of students before writing exams, contracts between the administration and students, long jail terms for cheaters that are caught and advanced software to catch plagiarism are just a few. Other techniques are open exams where students are allowed to utilize cheat notes, the Internet and books. Proponents feel that this is better as students often prepare more for these types of exams, they learn more and that it mimics real-world business thus preparing students with real business skills before entering the workforce.

This culture of cheating and cheaters is accepted in Thailand. No one cares about it. No one understands how it is hurting the business community or the academic community. It's quite apparent when you look at the power structure of Thailand and how things are run here. Things are not going to change here until they lose so much that they are forced by external pressures to do something about it. It might be too late by then. I hope not