Thursday, August 27th, 2015
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Critics on Cambodia High School Exam 2015
This year is signified by its second attempt of education’s dictatorial regime of Cambodia to strictly monitor the exam’s session for high school students nationwide (watch video clip by RFA).
There are more than 87,000 candidates have lined up in different 150 exam centers to enter into 3576 restricted exam rooms. The nation’s budget is spent not less than 4 millions dollar to attain the two days nationwide exam on August 25-26, 2015.
Cambodia has been well-known of rampant corruption accounting from officers’ offices to school compounds. Urging to topple the school’s bribery and corruption regime, the new measure of dictatorial monitoring during exam has been taken place. The monitoring methods are incorporated by Anti-Corruption United (ACU) to dispatch exam monitors to inspect and to spook all entering students. The exam agents are scavenging hiding sheets under their pants, or sleeves, or inside their shoes etc. Exam monitors also walked around the rooms, the tables, and espy from all directions during the exam. Policemen are also dispatched to monitor the students as well.
This is weird scene looking from outsiders when they are recalling their high school exam experiences. Regardless to mention Western countries, Cambodia’s neighboring Thailand, their exam environment didn’t translate students’ confidence into hostility at all. Beside of well reform in education through fiscal transparency and increasing budget allocation towards the demands of schools especially to increase teacher’s decent salary, the curriculum and learning environment, all are conducive and incentive to students to grab knowledge at their maximum without grabbing the feeling of hostility.
Scene view of Cambodia Students during Exam 2015 – photo courtesy of MoEYs facebooke page.
The attendance, the effort, and the scores of yearly accumulation, all are included into students’ portfolio. The exam has been happened for students to fulfill their learning representing about 30 to 40 percent only at the year end. Strangely, Cambodian students’ portfolio has not been included. Their whole year effort is badly excluded. They are counted only two days exam. If they passed, they are happy; but if they are failed, they are sad. Many of them have given up schools without fulfilling their dream to step up tertiary education.
This has been seen as dictatorial and extreme policy for Cambodian high school students to bring with them confidence after 12 years compulsory enrollment.
Competitiveness?
Cambodian students who are lining up to enter into the rooms of fame (exam rooms) with confusing feeling of working hard 365 days is likely meaningless for them because they have to fight for homestretch in just these two days.
Those students are competing in two days to pass the exam. It seems Cambodia is good in setting up a competitive stage by dispatching thousand monitor agents (arbitrators) to believe in fairness but not the ability of the players themselves. The high school students (players) have been poorly trained within the schools’compound to prepare the facing up with those alien arbitrators. The students are believed to force to walk on broken glass.
How about Cambodia’s competitiveness with outsiders? Hard to speak about it for sure!
Tribunal Suspects Say They Won’t Cooperate With Court
Tribunal Suspects Say They Won’t Cooperate With Court
File photo of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, court officers of the U.N.-backed war crimes tribunal are seen through windows during a hearing of former Khmer Rouge top leaders in Phnom Penh, file photo.
All suspects were named by an international judge at the Khmer Rouge tribunal in cases 003 and 004, though they have never been arrested by Cambodian authorities nor formally indicted.
That means the court has only successfully tried one suspect since 2006, the former supervisor of Tuol Sleng prison, Kaing Kek Iev. Two more suspects, senior leaders Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, are currently in the second and final stage of their trial at the court.
The remaining suspects say they will not cooperate with the court, casting doubt on whether they will ever be tried.
Im Chaem, the former Khmer Rouge secretary of Preah Net Preah district, with VOA Khmer’s reporter Sok Khemara in her home, in Oddar Meanchey, on August 11, 2015. (Photo: VOA Khmer)
“I absolutely do not need to fight [the court],” told VOA Khmer recently at her home in Oddar Meanchey province. “I have built myself forward, through the ways of Buddhism.”
Im Chaem, the former Khmer Rouge secretary of Preah Net Preah district, Northwest Zone, is accused of “murder, extermination, enslavement, imprisonment, persecution on political grounds, and other inhumane acts” at a security center and worksite.
She denied any wrongdoing under the Khmer Rouge. “If I didn’t do things wrong, how can they arrest me?” she said. “It would be a human rights violation.”
When the international investigating judge, Mark Harmon, arrived at her house to issue his summons, she told him to leave and talk to her lawyer, she said. “I said only three words. He asked me to put the thumbprint. How can I put the thumbprint? I have nothing to put the thumbprint, and then I won’t go to the court.”
Recent photo of Meas Muth, a former Khmer Rouge naval military commander accused of grave atrocity crimes, at his home in Samlot district, Battambang province, August 12, 2015. (Photo: Sok Khemara/VOA Khmer)