VietNamNet Bridge - The Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) said it disagrees with education experts who believe that questions on this year’s high school final exams were too easy. 

Reports from 63 local education departments show there are thousands of 10/10 scores at the high school finals, an ‘abnormally’ high number compared with 68 exam papers which had a 10/10 score last year.

Before the 2-in-1 high school finals were organized, analysts warned that it would be difficult to design exam questions, because the questions must be easy enough for average students and difficult enough to identify the best students for universities. 

Le Truong Tung, president of FPT University, also said that it was difficult to design exam questions, and that the MOET’s bank of exam questions was not rich enough and needs time to accumulate questions. 

The Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) said it disagrees with education experts who believe that questions on this year’s high school final exams were too easy.

Tung said that if an exam creates a ‘rain of 10 scores’, this means the exam questions are too easy. As for the mathematics test, 200,000 students, or 25% of examinees got a 7 score or higher.

Vu Ngoc Hoang, former deputy chair of the Central propaganda and training commission, thinks new questions are needed.

Nguyen Duc Nghia, deputy director of the HCMC National University, said that the exam question design was the biggest problem in the organization of the 2017 high school finals as MOET did not have enough time to prepare its bank of questions.

“Even high scorers failed to apply for university and the major reason behind this is in the exam questions,” he commented. “It is undeniable that this year’s questions were easier than in the years before. There should have been difficult questions to find excellent students. But there weren’t. And this was the biggest problem of the exam.”

“Bui Van Ga, MOET’s Deputy Minister, said: “The number of examinees who got a 9-10 score accounted for no more than 3 percent of total examinees, while the average score of all exam subjects was a 5-6 score only. With these figures, the exam questions were not too easy.”

Asked why many high scorers could not apply at their chosen schools, Ga said that students had applied at only a few ‘hot’ schools. The schools set very high scores, and the number of students enrolled are modest. 

In HCM City, 70 percent of 71,500 examinees got marks above average in mathematics, 85 percent in literature, 58 percent in chemistry, 44.5 percent in biology and 66.3 percent in foreign languages.

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