When I was teaching at one particular school here, cheating was not only pandemic, but something the students weren't even ashamed about. It seemed to me as if the attitude was, if that's what it takes to pass, or get a good score, then it's entirely justified.

I've had experiences where I've caught students, during an exam, with a copy of the answer sheet hidden under their test paper. On two occasions, they were full color copies which they could only have got from a member staff at the school.

Other times, while marking exams, I would read their written work and know instantly that they'd copied it from the internet. Sure enough, after a quick google search, I'd easily find the article they'd copied from, word for word. We're talking a full A4 paged article that would have taken 15-20 minutes to copy. The exam was being supervised by a Khmer member of staff. It would have been impossible that they could have copied all of that off of their phone without the member of staff noticing. Whether it was a simple case of a blind eye being turned or some money changing hands, I never knew.

There were many other instances of cheating that I won't bore you with, but I twice bought it up with my manager. The first time I was told to simply deduct 10% off the final score of anyone I thought had cheated. The second time was about the student who had a copy of the answer sheet. Before I could even suggest that they should investigate which member of staff had given the answer sheet out, the four managers in the room burst out laughing. It was as if I should have awarded the student extra marks for their ingenuity.

I gave up complaining after that.

That's when the reality hit me that schools here, at least private schools, are not schools. They're businesses. The students aren't students, they're customers, or at least, their parents are.

Even the parents were in on the scam. They knew full well that their little darlings scores at the end of every term were based on false pretenses, but it just didn't seem to matter. Nobody, not the students, not the school, not the Khmer teachers nor the parents could have cared less. The only ones who did care seemed to be the foreign teachers.

I changed school after a while but I have to be honest, in my experience, most private schools tend to operate in similar ways here.

It's good that the government have cracked down on cheating in government run schools, I guess there's not much they can do about private ones.