A group of some 50 Cambodian grade 12 students are protesting their second semester exam results in Kampong Thom province. Failing the exam makes these students ineligible to sit the national high school exit exam in August, which is the sole factor for public university placement.

The reason for failing? That’s disputed.

The principal claims it’s because the students didn’t try hard enough. That may be true in some cases, but unlikely overall for two reasons. First, the bar to pass the exam is set very low. Students must correctly answer half of the questions on the exam in order to pass. That means a score of 50 percent—a failing grade by most standards—counts as passing on the semester exam. Second, the total number of students who failed equal one-third of the grade 12 population. It is unlikely such a large number of students failed when the bar to pass is so low.

The students claim they failed because of the structural inequality built into the system of education. Most of the students who failed couldn’t afford private tutoring classes, which are held by their mainstream schoolteachers. From my experience, these classes are necessary because teachers are underpaid and the school day is too short to adequately teach the curriculum. Without the extra classes, the students were unlikely to have mastered the material on the examination.

But some of the students’ claims are more sinister than short school days or an overloaded curriculum. They point to revenge-like behaviour by the teachers. Since teachers tutor their own students and also grade the monthly and semesterly exams, they have undue power over students’ scores. If a student doesn’t go to and pay for private tutoring classes, then the teacher, who lost out on some amount of money, could use her or his grading power to punish the students with failing grades.

The real story probably will never be known. Grading practices, tutoring classes, and their overlap aren’t transparent processes. Nevertheless, I tend to shy away from individualising the problem either as a student’s failure to comprehend material (as the principal suggests) or as system-wide teacher corruption (as the Phnom Penh Post suggests). Instead, I would focus on the structural issues that necessarily exclude some students who do not go to private tutoring classes because of cost barriers or non-school related time commitments. There are surely cases of students who didn’t study enough and teachers who took advantage of their situation, but it isn’t likely to explain the entire effect.