Graduation exam errors

This is a heavy exam, putting pressure not only on millions of families but also on the Ministry of Education and Training itself. Therefore, every year, there are always stressful events happening around this exam, creating many questions not only from those involved but also from the whole society: technical problems in the organization, rumors of leaked exam questions, cheating... I wonder how to reduce stress in the following years?

The importance of the high school exam is difficult to argue because it marks the completion of high school - the basic level of education, marks adulthood, and is a stepping stone to entering life and career. However, the number of nearly 99% of candidates passing high school graduation each year also receives a question mark from society: is it worth spending resources (finance, human resources) to organize a cumbersome exam?

I believe this is not an easy question to answer. The assessment, if assigned to each school and locality as proposed somewhere, will certainly make a difference. Therefore, organizing a national exam to standardize the quality of completing a level of education is necessary: ​​it both motivates each school (from teachers to students) and ensures fairness in the entire education system. The story is only how the education sector innovates the form of organization and ensures fairness in the examination process, starting with thoroughly limiting errors.

Rumors about leaked exam papers are a common problem, causing confusion for many candidates and their families. There are two aspects that need to be noted here: preventing sources of false information and increasing confidence in the organization's capacity, including the security of the exam. In addition to applying technology to security, I think that handling incidents of leaked exam papers needs to be more thorough, for both the party that leaked the papers (if any) and the person spreading the fake rumors.

Fake news is not only a problem in the education sector but in all sectors around the world. Legal sanctions are the way to prevent it. Those who spread rumors about leaked exam questions in recent years have only been administratively fined from ten to twenty million VND (according to Decree 15/2020/ND-CP). This greatly reduces the deterrent effect.

In addition, scandals in the education sector related to the seriousness at small levels - schools, communes or districts - have contributed to increasing social suspicion of education. Therefore, the Ministry of Education and Training itself needs to be responsible for the people's trust.

Technical problems are something that can happen in a cumbersome exam with millions of candidates. In any process, errors are completely normal, the problem is how to check and handle the errors. The incident of the exam paper in Dak Lak province having skipped letters and incorrect mathematical symbols is considered serious, affecting the quality of the students' exam. According to regulations, the exam paper will go through a process of checking the quality of printing and copying. So why are technical errors still overlooked? In parallel, there was also the incident of a supervisor signing the wrong box on the exam paper at a council in Ho Chi Minh City, causing anger among candidates and parents.

Both incidents affected the students' rights - something that needs to be completely eliminated in a contest that aims for fairness for all candidates across the country.

Cheating is another aspect that appears frequently in the high school graduation exam. Cheating is not unique to Vietnam. However, cheating at a very basic level, by bringing documents with you to copy, has raised the question for educators: is there still a place for rote learning in the test? In an era where Google has become a verb to search for information on the Internet, memorization is clearly no longer an important skill that needs to be standardized. The desire to innovate in exams places higher demands on the way questions are created, so that candidates do not have to rely on documents.

This is the last high school graduation exam of the 2006 education program. Next year is the first high school exam of the 2018 General Education Program, an opportunity to eliminate rote memorization exams.

Organizing a national exam with more than a million candidates, the pressure and burden on the ministry is huge. The new education program will be a good opportunity to change: sanctions, exam thinking and all other processes related to implementation.

The competition to standardize knowledge for students must start with standardizing the organizational capacity of educators.