A lot of educators and analysts have called on the Ministry of Education and Training to remove the national high school final exam, which they believe is unnecessary and too costly.

The spectacular achievements

A new record has been made in Vietnamese examinations’ history: Quang Binh province has become the locality which has 100 percent of continuing education students passing the high school final exams.

The statistics can show the extraordinary efforts of the province. In 2007, the first year of the movement of “saying “no” to exam frauds”, only 6.65 percent of continuing education students passed the exams. In that year, Quang Binh ranked the 55th among 64 provinces nationwide in the percentages of students passing final exams.

Meanwhile, just four years later, with the growth rate of 19-30 percent per annum, Quang Binh has become the province with 100 percent of continuing education students passing the exams. None of the 643 examinees failed the exams. Meanwhile, 21 other localities have the percentages less than 80 percent

Tuyen Quang province has also made a breakthrough with 99.76 percent of high school students passing the exams, ranking the third nationwide, just after Nam Dinh and Ninh Binh. The achievements have been described as “miracle”, because this is a difficult mountainous province. In 2007, only 14.2 percent of students passed the exams.

Besides Quang Binh and Tuyen Quang, other localities have also witnessed impressive achievements, including Son La, Yen Bai, Ha Giang, Lai Chau and Hoa Binh.

In previous years, northern provinces were listed among the localities with high achievements. Meanwhile, in 2011, the achievements of southern provinces most attract the special attention from the public. The proportion of students passing exams in Can Tho increased from 86 percent in 2010 to 97.74 percent in 2011, while the figures in Kien Giang from 74.13 percent to 97.34 percent, in Bac Lieu from 84.34 percent to 95.48 percent.

Especially, the number of continuing education students passing the exams has made a big jump. The proportion in Dien Bien soared from 21.05 percent to 91.17 percent, in Kien Giang from 19.38 percent to 86.84 percent.

A costly and time consuming exam

With the steady high proportions of students passing final exams every year, educators believe that it is not necessary to organize a national final exam

A lot of provinces have the high proportions of students passing exams of 98-99 percent, which means that only 10-20 students out of every 1000 students fail exams. The average proportion of the country is 95 percent, which means that only 50,000 students out of one million students fail exams. Is it really necessary to organize a national exam for millions of students, which gather tens of thousands of proctors and thousands of servicemen and security officers?

Professor Van Nhu Cuong, Headmaster of the Luong The Vinh High School, a well known educator in Vietnam, also said that it is too costly to print exam questions, while thousands of officers need to be isolated for one month to ensure the exam questions’ secret. He thinks that no need to organize such a tense and costly exam, while the purpose of the exam proves to be limited.

Meanwhile, other educators believe that it is still necessary to organize final exams, but they should be carried out in a different way.

The headmaster of a high school in Hanoi said that it would be better to assign schools to assess their students after a period of teaching them.

TP