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SINGAPORE: A director and two professors at a private school devised a plan to help six foreign students cheat on the 2016 GCE O-Level exams, using Bluetooth devices and mobile phones strapped to the students’ bodies.
After a lengthy trial, then-director Pony Poh Yuan Nie, 54, was sentenced on Wednesday (September 16) to four years in jail.
Co-defendant Fiona Poh Min, 33, received three years in prison, while Feng Riwen, 28, a Chinese national, received two years and four months in prison.
The trio, who worked at the now-defunct Zeus Education Center, were convicted of 27 counts of cheating in July, after a 20-day trial spanning a year and a half.
Prosecutors said the crimes had distorted the situation on the O-Level exams, “an important national exam in our local education system,” posing “a serious affront to the underlying principles” of the system.
Pony had hatched the conspiracy in what the prosecution called a “bold, multifaceted and urgent operation,” in which students had devices strapped to their bodies and carefully concealed under layers of clothing.
The “clandestine operation” was carried out for three examinations. It was only discovered when a supervisor heard unusual electronic broadcast sounds and voices coming from one of the students.
The October 2016 assignments taken by the six students, ages 17 to 20, were for subjects that included English, math and science.
A few hours before each exam, Fiona and Feng would record the devices on the students and test them to make sure they worked.
During the exams, co-defendant Tan Jia Yan, also a teacher, sat down as a private candidate and used FaceTime on her phone to live stream the questionnaires back to the registration center.
Fiona and Feng worked on the questions and called on the students to read the answers.
Pony was labeled by the prosecution as the mastermind of the entire plan. As director, she decided how the operation would be carried out and approved the actions of her co-defendants, supervising the entire process on the day of the exams.
While the students were in the test halls, they wore skin-colored “in-ear” headphones that gave them answers to tests.
Of the four, Tan was the only one to plead guilty and was sentenced to three years in jail in April of last year.
READ: Tuition teacher jailed for helping Chinese students cheat on 2016 O-Level exams
Prosecutors had asked for 52 months in jail for Pony, the longest jail term for being the most guilty chief operating officer. They asked for three years in jail for Fiona and 28 months for Feng.
A SOPHISTICATED OPERATION
The case involved a “sophisticated operation that involved at least four people working in concert,” prosecutors said.
They also used Bluetooth and FaceTime technology, and their actions “seriously undermined the integrity of the Singapore Examination and Assessment Board,” the prosecution said.
“The crimes have inevitably caused a loss of public confidence and confidence in the administration of an important national examination,” said Assistant Prosecutors Vadivalagan Shanmuga and Cheng Yuxi.
They cited the sentence in the Tan case, where the judge said the case hits “at the heart of the meritocratic values that are sacrosanct to our educational system.”
“The sentence must be calibrated not only to adequately punish the wrongdoer. It must rectify the damage caused to the system and present a warning severe enough to dissuade those who would seek to profit from such a bold deception,” said the judge in the case of So.
For each count of cheating, the defendant could have been jailed for up to five years, fined, or both.
