By lowering standards to allow more people to pass, we are in danger of diluting the quality of our human resources. Recent events concerning the demonstration by 200 students at Pathumwan Institute of Technology demanding that acceptance scores be lowered to 30% for subjects like maths, science and the Professional Aptitude Test (PAT) has highlighted the need for a rethink in standards.

Having seen 47% of previous admissions fail in their classes, the idea of further reductions in acceptance criteria is fooling no-one. Are we to believe that the new students admitted will do better than the previous ones because the admission criteria has been relaxed?

My concern at this juncture would be that the next stage of the watering down of standards would be to massage the passing criteria for below par students to allow them to achieve passing grades. This is not the road we need to go down.

Coupled with another report that indicates that Thailand is losing ground in Information Technology competitiveness with the rest of the world, there is no better time to hold one’s hand up and say. “OK, this isn’t working. Let’s look at our failings and see what we can do to rectify our predicament.”

I can see most of you shaking your heads in disbelief, but what alternative do we have? Just carry on regardless? Having read an article in a management magazine last week, I was left to wonder if something like “focusing on failure” would ever work in Thailand.

The article in “Edge” suggested things like, “Getting teams to look at how others have made mistakes in the past persuades them to learn and adopt new policies.” Different countries have different cultures; would it be possible to introduce a new kind of thinking into our education system? Maybe after a while, we could even look at our own mistakes.

The university rankings which were also published recently drew mixed reviews depending on where you came in the ranking; however, we should not lose sight as to why we have these tables in the first place.

They are a by-product of the assessment carried out by a non governmental organisation which is transparent enough to publish its findings. The job of Office for National Education Standards and Quality Assessment (ONESQA) is to assess and show areas for improvement and this they do without regard of status and brand name.

I for one, am very happy with the work that is conducted by ONESQA, although it does throw up questions, such as, “Why isn’t there a standardised internal quality assurance procedure?” At present, it is up to the individual establishment to draw up their own, if they wish, or just follow the external assessment requirements. Teachers who are not managers or administrators are left to their own devices once again and are expected to come up trumps when it’s reporting time.

The results by ONESQA are not a witch-hunt. They are intended to show areas of improvement for us to act on. Dare I say, we are encouraged to focus on our failures and take the necessary action to improve the situation.

In my opinion, the idea to focus on failure already works in certain areas of Thailand’s education system, it just needs to be used in other areas, but obviously with a different name, after all, nobody wants to be branded a failure.

Once we have got over the initial embarrassment of having made a mistake, it is possible to learn from the experience as long as we don’t make the same mistakes again.
(Unedited article published in the Bangkok Post 3rd November 2009)