Caution: flying rocks

Last night, several former Logos students came over for dinner. One, Chenda, recently returned from a 6-month Discipleship Training Program in Europe. While there, her oldest sister passed away, and Chenda’s been struggling to process her sister’s death since returning to Cambodia. (It was an electrical accident that killed her sister: some live wires were left touching her metal front door. What a terrible, needless tragedy.) Her sister’s oldest daughter is about to take the national exam to graduate high school, which carries a lot of prestige. So Chenda’s offered to accompany her niece to the exam and wait there until she’s finished.

“It’s a lot of pressure,” Chenda told us.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, they all want so much to pass, even though you can go on to college if you fail it. So it’s expected that whoever accompanies the student will help them with the answers.”

“How? Are you sitting next to them in the room?”

“No, but people write down the answers, tie them to rocks, and throw them through the windows.”

“How do you know if the answers are for you? And isn’t that kind of dangerous?”

“Yeah, sometimes people don’t aim well, and students are hit in the head. And I guess students just share the answers.”

“And the teachers don’t care?”

“Well, there are so many students that each teacher has to walk around patrolling several classrooms. So you throw the rocks when they’re not in your relative’s classroom.”

Chenda’s trying to figure out how to tell her niece that she can’t help her cheat. The other two Cambodian students concurred: one is in a Cambodian university now, where students in her class always suck up to her to get help with homework, if not exams. The other has received phone calls from her friends who are in the middle of university exams, asking for help with an English translation. They’ve heard stories of students sneaking into school the night before to remove the glass from the few classrooms that have glass windows. (Most just have a metal lattice pattern.)

It reminds me of a story I heard from an Australian professor working here to mentor postgraduate students in education. She said one of them, the dean of education at his university, came to her one day looking upset.

“I need your help! Last week, I saw a student in tears. She had her exam for my class the next day, and she’d failed it once already. She was so anxious about failing again, and I felt really bad for her.”

“So why do you need my help?”

“Well, I ultimately gave her the answer sheet, but told her to write some down wrong on purpose so that her cheating wouldn’t be too obvious.”

“What!? And now you’re coming to me because you feel guilty or something?”

“No, because my boss noticed the vast improvement in her score and several others’ scores. She told me to meet with her about what happened, and the meeting is this afternoon! What should I do? I could lose my job over this!”

“Well, you might need to be honest and admit your mistake. I hope things work out for you!”

A few days later, she saw him again and asked how the meeting had gone.

He beamed. “She brought the dean of each college to the meeting, and asked us very sternly, ‘Do you know anything about students cheating?’ We all shook our heads solemnly, and she said, ‘Good!’ and told us we could go.”

Shortly after I arrived in Cambodia, there were articles in the paper about the crackdown on cheating in national high school exams. Previously, for maybe a dollar or two, students could buy answer sheets just outside the school. The crackdown didn’t forbid those vendors, but it meant that teachers were expected to confiscate any answer sheets they found. The rate of students who passed dropped that year from the overwhelming majority to a small minority.

I don’t know if the rock-throwing has started since then, or if it’s older. But one thing is clear: Logos’ commitment to academic integrity is pretty exceptional in Cambodia. Corruption extends far beyond the government.