VietNamNet Bridge – Many Vietnamese parents say teachers are giving inflated grades to students to satisfy parents and school headmasters.

Thu Ha, a marketing director of a medicine distribution company in Hanoi, said she had concerns about the very high marks given to her son in the 2013-2014 academic year.

“I could not imagine why my kid, who is careless and lazy, who prefers pleasure to learning, could be such an excellent student,” she told a psychologist, a friend of her husband’s.

“I am afraid that the teacher deliberately gave high marks to the boy as a return for the gifts that I gave her on some special days,” Ha said.

“A friend of mine is right when she told me that she could not believe in the grading scheme. The marks students receive do not truly reflect their real learning capability,” she continued.

A local newspaper several days ago reported that a mother in Hanoi asked her child’s teacher to lower the child’s grades from “excellent” to “good”.

The mother, whose child is a fourth grader, after checking the exam paper, discovered some mistakes. However, the mistakes were overlooked by the teacher, which helped the boy get a mark of 10 for the exam.

The boy also made some minor mistakes in the Vietnamese language exam paper, but he also still got a 10.

“The teacher told me that she had granted privileges to my son so as to encourage him. But I don’t think this will help. I am afraid that the privileges would do more harm than good,” she said.

Le Minh Son, a well-known Vietnamese musician and parent, said he was happy that his son had completed another academic year, although he had ranked 55th out of the total 57 students in the class.

Son said the grading scheme in Vietnam does not truly reflect Vietnamese students’ capabilities.

“An excellent student does not always mean a talented person. Meanwhile, a bad student at school can become a successful man in society,” he said.

However, unlike Son, not all Vietnamese parents accept low marks.

A parent in HCM City reportedly visited a school’s board of management, asking why her child was an “above average” student, while the other classmates were all “excellent”.

She believed that the teachers were “unfair” when giving lower marks to her child.

The teacher of a primary school in Hanoi said that 85-90 percent of students were “excellent”, while most of the others were “good”.

Meanwhile, the educator says, the ideal ranking of students is as follows: the number of excellent students should not account for more than 5 percent of the total students, while the number of very good students no more than 15 percent, and the number of good students no more than 40 percent. The others must be “above average”, “average”, or weak.

“There must not be too many excellent students because students can be good at one or two subjects, but very few students can be perfect at everything,” she explained.

Nguyen Thao