Bangkok Blogs

I’m currently doing a bachelor degree at one of the main universities in Bangkok and would like to share my very own university life experience with you. At my university, there are well over 20,000 students so it’s quite a big university. I’ve been here for one full year but so far I’m still perplexed how the system is working.

My university is an international university so everything is taught in English. However, I’ve made some general observation that the majority of Thai students will try at all costs to avoid or deal with Western students because they are either to shy to speak English or perhaps they just don’t like foreigners.

I have to say that I was gobsmacked in the first few weeks but I’ve now been told that this is rather normal. It may sound unbelievable but did you know that just 10% of university graduates in Bangkok can speak English and merely 5% or less of them can speak it fluently. They tend to be quite good at grammatical rules and stuff but when it comes to speaking, it’s a completely different matter.

As far as how students in Bangkok learn stuff is concerned, the notorious rote learning here doesn’t teach students to think but instead to remember exactly what they read in books which they tend to forget the minute they left the exam room. And the exam format is a complete joke too, typically composed of multiple-choice, matching and some short answer questions. Even the teachers love it because it’s a lot easier and quicker for them to mark the papers so they can bugger off sooner.

Back in the UK, I would need to spend an awful lot of time swotting up on stuff before any exams, but here in Bangkok I need at most a day or two to revise for a particular exam and some exams are so easy they don’t need revising at all unless you need to get a definite A.

What about assignments? To be brutally honest, they can be a piece of piss, especially for students in English programme. They typically copy and paste articles from the Internet, and most of the time they don’t edit any words at all.

University students in Bangkok are given complete freedom to modify class schedules that suit their convenience provided there are available seats in the classroom. Typically, the class size is quite big (50-60 students) as most people choose to be in the same section with their mates. They also tend to have classes for two days on a weekly basis.

The reason the students have classes just two days a week is obviously because they organise their schedules so that they have more time off to enjoy themselves, even though that means they have to start early in the morning and finish very late in the afternoon, sometimes without any breaks.

I could be entirely wrong but I think this is the crux of the problems; Many of the university students in Bangkok, in particular the more prestigious ones, come from quite high income families and as a result they are spoilt beyond belief, which is then reflected in the amount of effort they put into studying.