The Ministry of Public Security said in a statement today, May 14, that the Investigative Security Agency had brought legal proceedings against Diep Thi Hong Lien, 45, deputy head of the Testing and Quality Assurance Division, under the provincial Department of Education and Training.

In the previous high school examination, Lien served as the deputy head of the paper-marking division in charge of literature papers.

Investigators found that she had abused her position of power to directly interfere with the scoring and to instruct the heads of literature examiners to raise the scores of these papers, in violation of the regulations on the national high school examination.

Today, the police raided her home and workplace in an attempt to collect additional evidence.

Late last month, three female teachers in Hoa Binh, who served as examiners in the examination, were arrested for their alleged manipulation of scores on literature papers.

In 2018, investigators also pressed charges against three local educators for their abuse of power in altering the multiple-choice test scores of students.

The results of the national high school examination, held annually in June, are used to determine whether a student qualifies for graduation from high school and admission to colleges and universities in Vietnam.

Last year, hundreds of exam papers from the three northern upland provinces of Ha Giang, Son La and Hoa Binh were found to have been illegally corrected by officials. SGT

Thanh Thom