By Tan May Ping

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.

The court heard that Shanti, who was posted to the school in 2003, taught the Tamil language to Primary 6 students at Canberra Primary School.

She was also the subject head for Aesthetics (Visual and Performing Arts).

Deputy Public Prosecutor Ramu Miyapan told the court that on 5 Oct 2007, Shanti was assigned to invigilate a class at the school, where four of her students were taking their examinations.

Earlier, the school's internal presiding examiner, Mr Ng Guan Chye, had briefed invigilators that they were not allowed to invigilate a class where their students were taking the examinations, as stipulated by the Singapore Examinations and Assessment Board.

But Shanti did not notify Mr Ng.

When the students completed the Tamil Language Paper 1 or the written composition component, Shanti went around the class collecting the answer scripts. She collected her students' scripts last so that they were not mixed up with the rest of the scripts.

After all the students and other invigilators had left, she looked through the script of one of her students and spotted several mistakes.

She used her blue ballpoint pen to amend the student's script, and proceeded to make another 17 spelling corrections.

She also made corrections for another student.

Shanti then submitted all the scripts to Mr Ng at the library on the third floor.

Later that day, Shanti invigilated the same class for the Paper 2 exam, comprising a multiple choice component (Paper A) and a fill-in-the-blanks component (Paper B).

Again she collected her students' answer scripts last.

Once the students had left, she took the scripts to a toilet on the fourth storey. There, she made 12 corrections in Booklet A of the first student using a pencil and an eraser.

She used her blue ballpoint pen to make five modifications to the student's written answers in the fill-in-the-blanks section in Booklet B.

She also made changes to the booklets of two other students, including the second one whose script she had changed earlier in the day.

The discrepancies in the answer scripts were discovered by the markers at the centralised Tamil Language Marking Centre. The handwriting was said to be that of an adult.

Mr Masoothu Abdul Rahiman, chief supervisor of the 2007 PSLE marking exercise, said that if the amendments had not been discovered, the students would have got marks that they did not deserve.

In late October 2007, the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau received information that several Tamil language scripts of students at Canberra Primary had been tampered with, and that bribery was suspected.

DPP Ramu noted that Shanti had several opportunities to notify Mr Ng that she had been assigned to invigilate her own students but failed to do so.

The district court heard that she did not stand to be paid for what she did.

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.

Judge May Mesenas allowed the application from her lawyer, Mr Subhas Anandan, to adjourn her mitigation plea.

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

This article was first published in The New Paper.