Faced with an epidemic of cheat-sheet sales for university entrance examinations, the Ministry of Education has shut down copy shops and bookstands located near examination sites.
“They are taking stricter measures this year,” said Phan Phieng, police chief for Daun Penh district in Phnom Penh.
In addition to enforcing the closings, police are also guarding the perimeter of school examination sites, Phan Phieng said.
“We are not allowing any children or relatives to pass cheat sheets into the school compound,” he said.
The two-day examination period, which determines whether 12th graders may attend a university or not, ends today.
Officials were trying to forestall just the kind of mob scene that occurred Sunday night at two bookstores near Daun Penh High School.
A crowd of 30 to 50 high school students, driving motorbikes or emerging from cars, jostled to buy examination answers on sale for between 200 and 2,000 riel per sheet. Tea Rara, 17, spent 2,000 riel to buy small pads full of answers in tiny writing.
“We hide the answers, and if the monitors are easy, we can take a look,” said one girl who asked that she not be identified.
But some of the answers may be worthless.
Some teachers at local private schools take answers from textbooks and sell them, trying to pass them off as answers to the Ministry examinations, one bookstore owner said.
“I don’t think these are the correct answers for the Ministry test, but some of them could be right somehow,” said the bookstore owner, who also declined to be named.
But government officials say controls are tightening.
Last year teams of four monitors and two supervisors circulated among five rooms; this year the same team oversees two rooms, said Oum Heoung, municipal education director for Phnom Penh.
The supervisors are teachers brought in from other provinces, because local teachers are more likely to help their students cheat, Oum Heoung said.
