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A few years later - and I think my friend had substantially lowered her standards by this time - she asked her students to draw a conclusion from a statement by John Stuart Mill. As a result, not one but six students actually drew a picture as their answer. They were not visual-arts students, neither was this a creative writing class.

A few weeks ago, when an Australian university professor asked a Thai international school student who was applying for the language and culture class he's teaching to voice some opinions on euthanasia, her reply was "Sorry, I can only comment on youth in Thailand."

My personal experience in the same weekend of interview examinations was less amusing.

A student who claimed on her application form to be fluent in French, had never heard of last year's hit French movie "The Class" by Laurent Cantet. I could have tried her with "Amelie" or "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly", but I didn't think it was worth it.

I was also surprised by the English of a well-to-do Thai student who had spent two years studying in New Zealand. Some of my drama-major students in the regular programme speak better English, without having lived overseas.

Later on, she admitted to sticking mainly with Thai friends while in New Zealand.

Another student was attending an international school in Bangkok whose name I had never heard of. His English was not good either, and he revealed that 90 per cent of his classmates were Thai.

Of course, I have met promising students, too.

A female student from a regular school in Phuket had studied for a year at a high school in Michigan as part of an exchange programme - her spoken English is now up to an American student's standard. Her attitude was mature as well: she doesn't spend hours every day on MSN Messenger and Facebook, and knows what she wants from an international programme - and life - and is prepared to work hard to get the best out of it.

This kind of student is probably part of the reason why some well-established Thai university international courses are now known for exchange programmes with reputable overseas universities and successful graduates who go on to good careers or postgraduate studies.

On the other side of the coin, |an international-programme university student recently reported a professor in a science lecture saying: "This is a loma." The English word for dolphin escaped him so he slipped into Thai, much to the astonishment of the entire class. It begged the question whether this was an international programme or an intercultural one.

A master's degree in "cultural management" includes an annual overseas trip, which you would expect to include seminars and workshops related to this significant topic, or simply meetings with museum curators, cultural policy makers or directors of dance and theatre companies. Instead, it's a cultural tour: students simply visit museums and watch an opera and a few theatre and dance productions - in other words, what most Thai tourists don't bother with on holiday.

It's no surprise then that few graduates from this programme ever actually get jobs managing cultural activities in this country.

Another graduate international programme requires each student to present an English-language paper at an international conference. The course recently held its own conference in Lijiang, China, and most participants were Thai. That was enough to meet the course requirement - on paper, at least.

But it seems that more and more youngsters are being put off by the admissions system for regular university programmes, which is confusing, and taking the simpler admission route to international courses.

Actually, given the fact that many regular-school students now pay more attention to classes in private tuition schools in the evening and on weekends, instead of engaging in extra-curricular activities such as sports and arts like their international-school counterparts, the whole secondary school system in this country needs overhauling.

Universities that offer these programmes - and there are plenty now - usually benefit by gaining a better world ranking.

The extra money they bring in pays for better computer and audio-visual equipment, new buildings and faculty trips overseas.

Meanwhile, overseas-educated Thai professors have the opportunity to teach English-language courses and earn the kind of money that they would make at universities abroad. And those international-school students caught between two stools - not being able to get into an overseas university and not able to work through the regular university admission system because of their limited Thai - are now happy to find a seat available at a prestigious university.

Then there are the parents who, paying much less than they had been for international primary and secondary schools here, are satisfied with the fact that their loved ones are getting a world-class education without having to leave their home country. Everybody is happy, which means criticism will probably fall on deaf ears.