Testing Thais: Establishing The Ordinary In Thai National Exams

Abstract

The Thai national exam, explicitly aimed to standardize education, limits acceptable forms of knowledge and normalizes divisions of citizens. While branches of the Ministry of Education claim to use exam results as a means to objectively measure students' and schools' capacity, these results also reflect sufficient adherence to state rhetoric. Through the form of the exam questions, social divisions are normalized and reified through graphs and maps that make them seem rational and apolitical. Although citizens accept the form of the exam as a necessary evaluative tool in this international testing milieu, the education system in Thailand is not a unitary one, so it cannot reflect what every student learns in the classroom and thus is subject to critique. iii