yeah, they'll confiscate those at the border

Master's students here have to write what's called a "thematic paper." This is a brief (like, 10 or 15 pages) description of the music they're going to play at their degree recital. It's an uneasy compromise between the college of music administration (who'd prefer a U.S.-style degree that includes only recitals and no paper at all) and the university administration (who mandate that all master's degrees include a thesis). It has to be written in English.

As the only native English speaker in my department, I'm always asked to look at these papers for language. As a functioning member of my very small department, I (along with my colleagues) also serve as a committee member, making comments on content, format, and other issues.

The students tend to forget that second part--they figure I'm the English expert and nothing else.

Recently I read a draft of one of these papers. It wasn't bad. It was cursory, as such a short paper must be, and it included all of the common English errors that Thai people make (verb tenses that don't match, words like articles left out, and, for some reason, writing "c" for "z"--I don't understand that one). But the information was good, for the most part, and I was pleased that the student had done some good research. That's hard to do here, since the library is a big, beautiful, empty building...but that's another story for another day.

Unfortunately there was a really big problem with the paper: it included NOT ONE SINGLE CITATION. There was a brief bibliography (about 5 works, including a basic music history textbook and a music encyclopedia, which, again, is a whole other problem), but nothing in the paper to show the sources of this student's information...most of which, I can tell you for sure, is too obscure to have come from the general sources in his bibliography.

Before I met with this student I showed the paper to the head of academic affairs to talk about citation and the kind of training this student would have had in the proper way to do these things. Turns out he has passed a class in it (like bibliography in the U.S. but called research methods here) and should know very well that this is a big problem.

I met with the student and started to take him through my comments. I pointed out every single place where there should be a citation. He nodded at the first few, but after a page or so he began to look really uncomfortable. He started to make excuses.

He'd learned some information directly from his teacher and didn't know how to cite that. He'd given a bibliography at the end of the paper--wasn't that enough? Some of his sources weren't as well-known as these general books--he thought listing them would make him look bad.

And then, the crowning jewel of bs excuses.

"Footnotes are not allowed in Thailand."

I was speechless.