High school graduation exam leak: Two teachers "told" the exam in advance to acquaintances

The Hanoi People's Court has just issued a decision to hold a first-instance trial of the case of leaking biology questions in the 2021 high school graduation exam.

The defendants brought to trial are Ms. Pham Thi My (60 years old) and Mr. Bui Van Sam (74 years old). These two people were prosecuted by the Hanoi People's Procuracy for the crime of "Abusing position and power while performing official duties". The trial is scheduled for June 29.

The investigation agency determined that Mr. Sam and Ms. My (both former teachers of the Biology Department - Hanoi National University of Education) were assigned as team leader and deputy team leader, participating in building the exam question bank and the Biology exam question board. After building the exam question bank, when it came to organizing the exam questions, Ms. My was assigned as team leader and Mr. Sam was assigned as an evaluator of the Biology exam question board.

Investigation results showed that two people participated in both stages of building the question bank and creating exam questions in many high school graduation exams in previous years, and knew that the software did not randomly draw questions.

Therefore, in 2021, Ms. My and Mr. Sam took advantage of their assigned duties and authority to bring documents home to compile into questions, then arrange them in positions with high potential to be drawn as the official exam source.

In addition, they also used the above questions as exam preparation materials for 8 students who were relatives. Specifically, when building the exam question bank, Ms. My took the documents out of the designated area 3 times, including statistical tables of the number of newly compiled questions. Ms. My typed them up and put them in her glasses case to take home.

Mrs. My then edited and completed it on her personal computer at home and printed two copies for herself and Mr. Sam to each hold one copy.

After receiving the above documents, Mr. Sam edited directly on the printed copy, then discussed with Ms. My so that Ms. My could take notes, bring them home to edit and complete them on the computer.

They then put these question contents into the question bank in subsequent question bank construction rounds.

“Knowing the question extraction rules of the Ministry of Education and Training's management software, the two agreed to arrange the questions they compiled and edited into "pre-targeted" positions. The purpose was that when the computer extracted the questions to use as a source for creating the exam, these questions would be in the same combination. Then, when participating in the Exam Council, they themselves would choose these question combinations to make the official exam,” the indictment stated.

“During this process, they used the questions that had been successfully put into the question bank to teach and review for 8 12th grade students who were relatives and acquaintances who wanted to apply for university admission in group B, but "did not receive money from the parents or students but because of respect and personal feelings," the prosecution agency accused.

Mr. Sam said the only gift he received from his parents was a box of Korean ginseng.

On June 8, 2021, when the 2021 High School Graduation Exam Council was established, Ms. My, as the Head of the Biology Exam Team, upon receiving 16 question combinations, oriented the selection of 4 exam codes compiled by herself and Mr. Sam to make the official exam.

The members of the group agreed. After the group reviewed, commented, and edited, these 4 exam codes had some changes but the content remained the same and were approved by the Exam Council as 4 official exam questions for Biology used for the 2021 high school graduation exam.

The suspicion of leaking high school graduation exam questions in biology was once reported by the press.

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the 2021 high school graduation exam was held in two sessions, in July and August. After the first session ended, public opinion and the press reported on the suspicion of leaked biology exam questions, according to which the biology exam questions were "80% similar" to the online review questions of Mr. Phan Khac Nghe (Vice Principal of Ha Tinh Specialized High School). Ms. My and Mr. Sam were later prosecuted by the Ministry of Public Security's Investigation Security Agency on June 10, 2022.

The conclusion of the Ministry of Education and Training's Appraisal Council determined that the documents submitted by Mr. Sam contained questions 75% - 95% similar to the 4 official exam codes used in the first round of the 2021 high school graduation exam.

Regarding Mr. Phan Khac Nghe's online review questions, the Ministry of Education and Training's appraisal results determined: The questions compiled by Bui Van Sam and Pham Thi My and put into the question bank and the 4 question combinations selected as the official source for the questions compared to the questions in Mr. Phan Khac Nghe's online teaching videos have 70% to 100% similar content, including some questions that are identical in content, knowledge units, introductions and answers.

The investigation results determined that Mr. Phan Khac Nghe participated in the work of building the exam question bank (from 2009 to 2018) of the Ministry of Education and Training, and had an acquaintanceship with Mr. Sam and Ms. My.

In 2015, 2016, and 2018, Mr. Nghe emailed Ms. My about the biology exam questions. During the process of Ms. My participating in building the 2021 exam question bank, Mr. Nghe also called and emailed many times to make an appointment to find out information related to the biology exam.

However, the Ministry of Public Security's Security Investigation Agency concluded that there was no basis to determine that Ms. My met and exchanged information and documents related to the 2021 exam question bank with Mr. Nghe. On the other hand, because the documents Mr. Nghe taught on the Internet have no traceability value, there is not enough basis to determine that Mr. Phan Khac Nghe used documents of the accused Sam and My to teach.

Regarding the Ministry of Education and Training's question bank management software, it initially operated on a random selection mechanism and was applied to the 2018 Exam Council.

However, during the process of building the 2019 exam question bank, the National Testing Center staff assigned to manage the software were asked to edit the software by writing new source code to add the feature of ranking exam questions in each question box and change the software's question generation feature.

Therefore, the software will no longer randomly draw but will draw question combinations in which questions with the same ranking order will be in the same question combination.

The results of the investigation and document collection at the Ministry of Education and Training determined: The use of software to draw question combinations from the question bank at the exam council in 2019, 2020 and 2021 was not done randomly but was done according to the rule that questions with the same ranking order were drawn into the same combination.

The conclusion of the forensic examination of the Institute of Criminal Science of the Ministry of Public Security determined: The question bank management software in the server at the National Testing Center has the function of setting the "ranking order" of questions and when exporting the set of questions, the questions are randomly selected from the database.

However, in the software there are 2 source code segments that have the function of selecting non-random questions and if you use them when using the "Export test set" function, the questions will be selected as desired.

According to Vietnamnet