Delta students fail lit exam in droves

Published: 23/06/2009 05:00

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Students review before their high school graduation exams on June 2 at Vo Thi Sau High School in Ho Chi Minh City.

Mekong Delta students have failed their high school graduation literature exams in extraordinarily high numbers as educators say new open-ended grading criteria were possibly misinterpreted by exam graders.

Although the test’s new answer sheet was applied nationwide, at least three Mekong Delta provinces appear to have had severe problems applying the new grading standards.

Kien Giang Province Department of Education and Training Director Lu Van Nhut said less than 25 percent of his examinees obtained above-median literature scores, compared to 75 percent last year.

Less than 22 percent of twelfth-graders in neighboring Dong Thap Province obtained above-median scores, compared to 72 percent last year.

Dong Thap’s education department director Nguyen Hoang Nhi said the disparity between their rate and those of other provinces, where the average is nearly 70 percent, was “abnormally” wide.

Even if Dong Thap’s students were particularly bad at literature, the disparity should only be about 10 percent at most, said Nhi.

Both Kien Giang and Dong Thap have postponed announcing official exam results until the Ministry of Education and Training investigates the possible causes of the low scores.

Tran Van Nghia, deputy head of the ministry’s General Department for Educational Testing and Accreditation (GDETA), said the ministry would work to ascertain whether the new grading system had problems or whether student performance was really that poor.

Same questions, different answers

Several changes were made to this year’s literature exam answer sheet and grading system.

One was that the answer sheet was written in much more detail, but with the instructions that it be “applied flexibly” because the subject featured creativity, said Nghia.

Also new this year was the policy that provinces were required to grade tests from other provinces. The idea was to eliminate favoritism and make the grading process more objective.

An Giang Province education department director Nguyen Thanh Binh said the scorers from his province did their job well and that the low Kien Giang scores is understandable as other provinces also got lower scores compared to last year.

In An Giang, only 40 percent of students scored above the median level on their literature tests this year, compared to 80 percent last year. Binh said it was the province’s lowest level ever.

Ben Tre Province education department director Le Ngoc Buu told Thanh Nien his scorers graded the Dong Thap exams in line with the ministry’s new answer sheet.

“The examinees scored a bit poorly on the literature exam,” he said.

Literature teacher Nguyen Cong Hoan from Kien Giang’s Tan Hiep High School said he thought the wide disparity between provinces’ scores was not due to student performance, but instead on the various ways each province applied the “open-ended” exam sheet.

“Honestly, Kien Giang students are not so bad… I think 50 percent of them should have been able to get at least five out of 10 points on their literature exams.”

Nguyen Thi Hong Nam, head of the teacher training department at Can Tho University, agreed with Hoan. She said that applying the answer sheet strictly would give any student a low score.

“With such detailed answer sheet, examiners need to be flexible when scoring,” Nam said.

Preliminary statistics showed that 4,500 students failed the exams in Kien Giang Province, while around 3,000 failed in An Giang.

Given that 10,000 students failed in all of the region’s 13 provinces and cities, the results in Kien Giang and An Giang alone are staggering.

On the other hand, the northern provinces of Quang Ninh, Bac Giang, and Ha Nam saw 10 percent more students pass the exams this year as compared to last year.

One of the biggest disappointments for students who failed this year is that the ministry no longer holds make-up exams. Students have to wait till next year to resit the exam, said Hoang Ngoc Vinh, head of the ministry’s Vocational Training Department. Alternatively they could just go to vocational school, he said.

VietNamNet/TN

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