VietNamNet Bridge - Sixth graders applying to study at Tran Dai Nghia School in HCM City will have to attend an English test instead of an entrance exam. 

While secondary schools in Hanoi are prohibited from organizing entrance exams or test under any form, schools in HCM City still can select the best students themselves.

Tran Dai Nghia School, for example, requests students to sit an English test. 

Analysts said that the test is like an entrance exam with three exam subjects of math, literature and English.

However, the school argues that it is just a test that helps educators learn about students’ general abilities, and that with the new enrollment method, students will not have to go to extra classes to review for the exams – which was why the Ministry of Education and Training banned secondary school entrance exams.

However, extra classes were opened, and students still had to attend extra classes to intensively prepare for the test. 

The exam preparation classes opened by the teachers of Tran Dai Nghia School are crowded.

An, who finished a primary school in district 1, said she began going to an extra class as soon as the 2014-2015 academic year finished. However, An was still a newcomer in the class, because her classmates had had two lessons before.

Lan, the mother of An, said she could send the daughter to the extra class because she had good relations with a teacher at Tran Dai Nghia School.

“It is very difficult to register for extra classes at the school because the classes are always full,” Lan said, adding that the demand from students was very high, though the tuition was sky high.

Lan said she was told to pay tuition of VND7.8 million for the training course. Lan was also asked to buy two documents imported from the US.

“The tuition is  even higher than the fee for university entrance exam preparation,” she noted.

An, her daughter, has three lessons a week at the extra class. The lessons given there are reported as “relatively difficult”, or more difficult than the curriculum designed for the students who want to obtain Movers or Flyers certificates.

Nguyen Van Hieu, deputy director of the HCM City Education and Training Department, said the students at secondary education level of Tran Dai Nghia School all followed English intensive curriculums. 

Surveys showed that the students of the school all have high quality. Therefore, the city’s education department, to some extent, still wants to maintain the student selection method.

Chi  Mai