>> Over 1 million high school students gear up for exams
Many educators doubt the credibility of the impressive results of the national high school graduation exam recently released by local education departments around the country.
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| Students at Bui Thi Xuan High School in District 1, Ho Chi Minh City. |
The results show most of the 64 provinces and cities countrywide have a pass rate of over 90 percent. Many high schools even achieved a 100 percent pass rate.
A year-on-year increase of up to 40 percent in pass rates was also reported but an expert said the norm had often been a mere 5 percent increase.
Many educators, including Prof Van Nhu Cuong, Principal of Hanoi’s Luong The Vinh High School, said if these numbers are true, the reason may be that this year’s exam was much easier.
Cuong also suggested the education ministry should double-check exam supervision activities in provinces that reported a surge in pass rates but had shown no concrete evidence of better quality in education.
Other educators, such as Phan Thi Thu Ha, Vice Director of Dong Thap Province’s Department of Education and Training, said the exam might not have been properly supervised and cheating might have been rampant.
A former education official in Nghe An Province agreed. He said these figures were “dizzily high,” and thus unbelievable.
There is more to those statistics than meets the eye, he said.
Associate professor Tran Huu Ta, from Ho Chi Minh City University of Pedagogy, said exam supervisors definitely did not fulfill their duties since miniature copies of lessons that students had used during the exam could be easily found after the exam.
Nguyen Vinh Hien, Vice Minister of Education and Traing, however, said these figures were the result of hard work in each province and city nationwide.
Hien also rejected proposals that the national high school graduation exam should be eliminated on the ground that it is inefficient and ineffective for the ministry to organise such an exam if it fails only a small number of candidates.
Hien said teachers and students would have no impetus without such an exam.
In Vietnam twelfth-graders will have to sit for a national high school graduation exam administered by the Ministry of Education and Training before leaving high school.
In recent years, the ministry has requested all provinces and cities nationwide to cross-grade students’ exams to ensure fairness.
But education officials in many provinces and cities are still widely perceived to be infected with an “achievement disease,” meaning they would do anything to manufacture impressive statistics.
