I strongly suggest that you research in advance or you will end up like thousand of people with not enough time left to switch to a long term visa. You do not need to pay 30-40k baht for an ed visa with an agent if you truly want an "education" on learning Thai, self-defense, or something else. An agent is mostly for people who want a visa without actually going to class to learn anything, volunteer, etc.
Your anecdotal evidence have nothing to do with what we are talking about. Bangkok is very strict as Brandon described, which is completely unrelated to what you are describing (completely different thing). 95%+ of denied cases are in Bangkok.