独一无二, 无尽的爱

Just saw on the orange.mu website that students cheated on their HSC exams, for at least 3 subjects. It was only a question of time before such things would happen.

In fact, at the time I was taking my ACCA exams in London, more than ten years ago, this was already common. We would have Malaysian students calling their friends at home, or receiving calls from them, telling them what topics came out. Due to the time difference the Malaysian would then have about 2-3 hours to revise said topics.

Of course, as we came aware of such events, the Mauritian students would try and find Malaysian friends who would pass on such valuable information. It was thought more as a levelling the ballgame between foreigners than cheating together. Evidently, it was not fair to other candidates.

However, there’s only so much it can help you with if you had not seriously studied before. The 3hrs cramming of main points can help achieve a pass mark if you’re a borderline failure, but if you’ve been a lazybum for the whole semester, you can’t expect miracles (normally). These students were more concerned with a passmark rather than winning the top prize remitted to the world’s best students.

Anyway, it is interesting that they’ve been using Facebook as one of the means of transmitting the tips. I guess the users must by now have changed all their personal data and probably deleted personal pictures. But how successful would the Mauritian government be in tracking them and what kind of punishment would be meted out to them? I still remember the government last year blocking the site and having the site administrators pull down the fake profiles of senior local political figures.