The central university admission exam will not take place until June next year. But for some 120,000 Mathayom 6 students, the race toward the finish line has already begun.
After years of cram schools and countless nights of burning the midnight oil, their first race began last month in Khon Kaen. The roads in Khon Kaen district town are usually quiet during weekends. Not so when several thousands students plus their parents from across the country turned up for Khon Kaen University's direct recruitment examination for medical and dentistry students.
My daughter was one of them. I was there with her to witness first-hand the cut-throat system that I disagree with, but have no choice but to try to help my girl survive it. The university only accepts 20 medical students and 10 dentistry students. That's how competitive it is.
After Khon Kaen, the students will take several more direct recruitment exams at other universities to increase their chances before the big battles come next year.
For the uninitiated, there are two kinds of university entrance exams. The national one for all Mathayom 6 students in June, and the exams offered directly by separate universities because they think the central admission exam cannot properly screen students for them.
For those who want to go to medical and dentistry schools, a separate central exam for them takes place in February.
All of them require the students to have different types of scores from different types of tests to accompany their central exam results. Since the exams and supporting test scores are based on materials beyond high school textbooks, students feel forced to attend cram schools which specialise in exam cracking. My girl included.
In my day, we took one university entrance exam. We chose the fields we wanted to study and the universities we wanted to go to. Where we were sent to was decided by our exam scores.
Fair enough, I think. The education authorities disagreed. They thought this do-or-die system put excessive pressure on the students, enriched cram schools and made students ignore attendance.
So they designed this new system which gives high school students several do-or-die exams, still favours cram schools and allows school teachers to cash in from extra-curricular private tuition because students are required to have grade point averages from their schools, the higher the better, while the old system did not.
Despite such a complex system _ or maybe because of its senselessness _ Thailand's quality of education quality keeps sliding down the international rankings year after year.
At Khon Kaen, I witnessed how this system reflects glaring social disparity, the root cause of violence in society and political instability.
To travel to Khon Kaen to take the two-day tests, you have to have money. Some went by car. Others by plane. All costly. To increase the chances of success, you have to pay for your kids' expensive tutorial schools. No money, not much chance.
The canteen of the school where my girl was taking tests was packed with anxious parents. In front of them was food and water ready for their kids during breaks between what felt like exhausting boxing matches.
A mother sitting across me, her face sun-drenched, looked down and out. She came from Roi Et. Her daughter, she said, spent a month with school friends in Khon Kaen to attend tutorial schools. "It cost me over 10,000 baht," she said, sighing.
Another mother, well-dressed and with careful make-up, came from Bangkok with her husband and another child who attends an international school.
My daughter met a mutual friend from cram school. His parents came with him by plane, but stayed at the hotel while he went to take the university tests. He looked lost and frustrated.'
'Why take these tests when it's all about knowledge of the past?" I overheard him complain. "How can we break old barriers and create new knowledge if we go on like this?"
Indeed.
Despite the pressure and the frustration, he, my daughter and other kids taking the Khon Kaen exams can't deny they are among the privileged few who are nearly at the top of the education pyramid. When rote-learning and expensive exam-cracking skills are the success criteria, the majority of kids who fail or cannot afford to even try are punished with a sense of inadequacy. Many are full of anger at a society that is unfair to them.
My fear as a mother is not whether or not my daughter can make it in this system, but how she can live safely in a society riven by conflicts and violence amid widening disparity aggravated by this unthinking, unfair education system.
Sanitsuda Ekachai is Editorial Pages Editor, Bangkok Post.