Daily Lesson from Life 02 April 2009

"Thu, Apr 02, 2009 The New Paper - She amends answers in toilet

THE primary school teacher felt she was under so much pressure to achieve high grades that she did the unthinkable.

Shanti Krishnasamy, 40, tampered with the answer scripts of three of her Tamil language students during the Primary School Leaving Examinations (PSLE) of October 2007.

She admitted this in court yesterday, saying she even went to the extent of locking herself in a cubicle in a girls' toilet to make the changes.


Shanti pleaded guilty to three charges of forgery with the intention of deceiving the markers of the Tamil papers into believing that all the answers in the scripts were provided by the students. Five other charges were taken into consideration.

The New Paper first broke the story on 19 Nov 2007 after an anonymous whistleblower alerted us to the scripts that had been tampered with. It was the first known breach of the tight security in the conduct of the PSLE.

Shanti, who joined the Ministry of Education as an education officer in 1993, admitted that she had a personal interest in the results of her students, as they would have reflected on her commitment and capability as a teacher at the school.


Shanti, who has been suspended from her duties for a year now, can be jailed for seven years and fined for each charge."

The pressure of putting up a good performance can be so high that people who know better than to do the right things DID the exact opposite. While this happened to a veteran teacher, I wondered how many corporate warriors also succumbed to such pressure without ever being found out!

Lessons for me are:

1. high expectations are fine. At the same time, we must be willing to listen and understand that sometime some people cannot make the mark despite giving of their best. We must be able to mitigate the situation and provide some releases though ultimately we still need to hold the person responsible for the 'sub-par' performance;

2. personal integrity is very important and we must guard it with our full honor. It is easy to use the pressure as a reason for our breaches but it is not acceptable ultimately when the deeds we did were not the right things to do! Again, if we are the leaders we can be sympathized with the person but we cannot excuse the consequences.;

3. sometimes we need to adjust the expectations when the people come to us with their best efforts and yet failed to meet achieve the expectations. It will be difficult for us to lower our expectations but if we are in the situation where if we don't, the tasks will definitely fail. Then we need to provide the help to bridge the gap or we simply have to adjust the expectations lower. It is then upon us to explain to the next level up why we are going to miss the standard despite everything we had tried.

Taking responsibility for our own wrong doing is the right thing to do. As leader, taking responsibility for our people inability to accomplish set targets after considering all options must lie with us. We cannot push the blame to our people if they have tried their best and we accepted that they had done so!