Sunday, April 24, 2022

The Sanction of Cheating in a Public Professional Exam.

 

Around four days ago, the legal fraternity in Singapore got a nasty shock when the news broke that there were six law students were caught for cheating in their bar exams. This new has been a shock for Singapore.

We are proudly “non-corrupt” (we are officially the fourth least corrupt nation on the planet – the only Asian nation in the top five, ranking with New Zealand and the Nordics) and we revel in the reputation of being the best exam takers in the world. Why would any of our kids’ “cheat” when they had everything at their disposal to ensure they passed fair and square?

This incident has put the powers that be in a peculiar position. The government, which normally has a lot to say about incidents of “cheating” has been silent and left most of the talking to the judiciary. The Attorney-General’s chamber has recommended that five of the candidates have their admission to the bar delayed whilst one of them be delayed for a year. The Law Society has said that it would object their admission. The judge at the centre of the case, Mr. Choo Han Teck has stated that “something has gone wrong,” but at the same time has kept the names of the young offenders out of the public eye so as not to “prejudice” their futures. More of the story can be found at:

https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/culture-cheating-judge-delays-bar-admission-6-law-graduates-caught-cheating-exams-1875451; and

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/law-society-lawsoc-trainee-lawyers-cheat-bar-exam-2635466

This incident and the way that it’s been handled does raise several questions about one of the key points about Singapore’s entire system – namely the question of integrity and rule of law.

As mentioned earlier, Singapore is famously “anti-corruption,” and in fairness, the example was set by the top. Lee Kuan Yew, our first Prime Minister, held his ministers to such a high standard of integrity that suicide was actually the better option than being exposed to a hint of scandal and in way, you could say this has been institutionalised. My former Battery Commander, once told me that when he took the post of “Chief Supply Officer” of the Army, the anti-corruption people told him that they would be keeping an eye on him because he was in a “corruption prone” office.”

Our methods of keeping people on the straight and narrow also involves carrots as well as sticks. The best example is seen by our Ministerial Salaries, which are the world’s best. Whilst everyone knows about our ministerial salaries, the salaries of officials down the food chain are not to be sniffed at too.

So, how did six young people from “good” families get involved in a “cheating” scandal particularly for a profession that places ethnical practice as one of its main requirements? How is it such that the proposed sanctions sound more like a “slap on the wrist” or a “go stand in a corner” rather than a punitive sanction?

Well, let’s start with the definition of what counts as corruption. The corruption that Singapore fights so hard against, is inevitably the money variety. Public officials for example, are paid well, so that they don’t need to shake people down for bribes. People who get government contracts are actually supposed to deliver something of a reasonable quality rather than pocket the money and leave the nation with unusable infrastructure.

Tackling money corruption has made Singapore a shinning beacon. As a prominent Emirati businesswoman once said to me – “Singapore washes the face of the Oriental.”

However, as Professor Mushtaq Khan from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS – which as a matter of full disclosure was my first-choice university) argues, there are different forms of corruption. In an interview with “Hard Copy” of Nigeria, Professor Khan points out that in some states, corruption doe not need to involve money and provided the example of how a state can take your property by merely passing laws to do so without demanding a bribe. The state has the power to make what is illegal – legal. More on Professor Khan’s interview can be seen at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6H1SSyIxLLY

 


 Professor Khan also argued that the problem that many developing countries had was the fact that corruption drives tended to focus on grandstanding or the arrest of several prominent figures without addressing the rout cause of the problem – namely the fact that its not in the interest of the powerful and elite to follow the rules and that in the more advanced economies people followed the rules because it was in their interest not to.

Professor Khan, who is British-Bangladeshi, argued that in the UK for example, people followed the laws and stayed on the narrow because what they were afraid of was being shunned by their peers rather than the state. By contrast, in less developed economies, the elite used “informal” ways of enforcing contracts and nobody really told on anyone because everyone had “dirty laundry.”

In way this bar exam cheating scandal does put this under the spotlight. It’s not corruption in the sense that no money has changed hands and that the young people in question are not joining the civil service.

However, one has to ask several questions. Why, for example, did they feel that they could get away with cheating in an exam? Is there a culture of cheating in our judiciary? Then, there is the fact that whilst the Judge had stated that cheating in a professional public exam, dishonesty and lack of propriety were not the only vices on display, the sanction against the six was sought not as a punishment but as a form of reflection.

Sure, I get that we should allow young people a chance to redeem themselves. The crime in question is not like that of Brock Turner, who raped a woman in 2015 and was let off because the judge didn’t want to ruin his future. I also get the fact that the young people in question are not peddling drugs, which can be harmful to those they sell to.

However, why do we feel the need to protect them by keeping their names out of the public domain? We’ve argued that we need to hang drug couriers because regardless of the circumstances (whether they are medically slow or not) because they damage the fabric of society. We have no problem giving each drug courier a name and when activist like M. Ravi or Kristin Han try to humanise them, they get labelled as being less than patriotic or in Mr. Ravi’s case less than sane.

Well, these young people have damaged the integrity of the judiciary and for that, they need to be punished so that no one else gets the idea that they can cheat their way onto the bar. Nobody is calling for them to be jailed or hanged but at the very least, their acts need to known to the wider world. We need to create a system where people who cheat get shunned by their peers rather than waiting for the state and the judiciary to slap them on the wrist.

We need to be serious about maintaining our judicial integrity. We should understand that that the children of middle-class families, who are more often than not of lighter complexion, can do damage to the fabric of our society and we need to have the same zeal in holding them to account the same way we are so eager to hold the children of poorer people, who are more often than not from ethnicities of a dark complexion, to account for their actions.   

  

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Maira Gall