And there I was thinking it was just uninventive students who believed that any amount of perspiration could disguise a complete and total lack of inspiration.
A male student (the oddity among predominantly female English majors) had thought of one good idea for a term paper. He compiled a list of a few dozen Thai slang terms of the day and got some friendly farang to help him translate each into English.
The foreign teachers were particularly interested because he had had the wit to include a number of naughty examples. The entry for the seed of the sapodilla fruit had been graphically enlightening.
But following normal student practice, he had been careful to print each entry on a separate sheet of paper, even if it amounted to only a couple of lines. The resulting wodge of paper made a reassuring whoomp when it hit the teacher’s desk, much to the chagrin of the eager girls in glasses whose total pages had struggled to reach double figures.
The Thai teacher was suitably impressed. She hefted the opus, and without even a glance at the content, gave an instant evaluation. ‘Worth an MA at least.’ (I don’t know what she made of the erotic entries. Perhaps, like most Thai teachers faced with a mass of marking, she merely sampled the nth page.)
Another example of the triumph of Thai concern for form over content, you might suppose. And aren’t students the world over past masters at padding?
But then you find this is in fact state policy.
Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Education and the richest member of the Cabinet Pongthep Thepkanchana has been assigned to supervise the legal team preparing to contest the Preah Vihear issue with Cambodia at the International Court of Justice. He has recently been to London to follow up on their progress.
He came back quietly confident that Thailand can counter Phnom Penh’s arguments, which must be reassuring to the nationalist faction. The rationalist faction however (if there is any such thing) might be a bit concerned about the reasons for his confidence.
“We have presented 1,600 pages of documents to the ICJ so far,” Mr Phongthep said, “compared with the 300 pages submitted by Cambodia.”
Mr Pongthep, a qualified lawyer, with the benefits of a foreign education, previously Minister of Justice and Energy, and at one time a judge, clearly does not know something that any building site labourer could tell him.
Five sieves hold no more water than one.
Does he seriously think that the learned jurists of the ICJ will decide between Cambodia and Thailand on the basis of the number of pages each side submits? Are international disputes to be adjudicated on the number of trees sacrificed for the cause?
If so, one wonders how Khun Pongthep came to his verdicts when he was serving as a judge. Perhaps he found for the party producing the most witnesses. Or for the lawyers with the longest closing remarks.
Awarding grades on the basis of length alone may be illogical, but it’s probably not that much worse than any other method you might find in the make-believe fantasy world of educational establishments. My favourite has to be the ‘staircase’ method, where you drop a pile of scripts at the top of a flight of steps; those that land on the first step get an A and so on.
It is when the same principle of quantity always trumping quality moves into the real world that you start to worry. Have you ever noticed the abnormal length of Thai constitutions? Is that because Constitutional Drafting Assemblies have carefully counted the number of articles in previous attempts and set themselves the task of bettering that score?
How far will this idea be taken? Will people come to believe that the longer a column like this drones on, the superior the writing?
Right, I’m not having that. I’m stopping right here.
