2024 is the second year the APMOPS organizing board organized the first round of the completion online, which meant that competitors could stay in their countries. 

However, while Singapore and other countries organized the first round on April 18 afternoon at schools, the organizing board allowed Vietnam to organize the first round two days later, on April 20. Vietnamese students were allowed to take APMOPS exam online at their homes via websites and the competition’s apps.

According to Tran Phuong, a teacher with many years of experience preparing students for APMOPS in Singapore, a rare trouble occurred that soon after the first round of APMOPS was organized on April 18, a mathematics center in Singapore published the answers for all 30 questions of the exam on YouTube on April 19.

A center that teaches mathematics in English in Hanoi, after finding that the answers were published, also guided its students to solve the APMOPS questions.

“The doubt about the exam question leakage was raised by a sixth grader in Hanoi. The student attended the competition for excellent sixth graders when he was a fourth grader and won a gold medal,” Phuong said.

“The math center in Hanoi showed the right answers to all APMOPS questions one day before the exam was officially organized in Vietnam,” he explained.

Phuong has shown the link where the answers to 30 exam questions could be found.

While the math center in Singapore gave detailed answers and explanations to the questions, Vietnamese students were just required to give answers, without any required explanations.

Phuong said in such conditions, it was easy to cheat on the exam. This explained why many students got surprisingly high exam scores.

The results of the first round will be made public in early May. This allows the students who passed the first-round examination to have time to prepare for the next round, to be held in Singapore.

In Singapore and other countries, the results were released on May 2, 2024. But the results in Vietnam have not been publicized yet.

If the exam questions really leaked out, the organizing board should organize another exam in Vietnam for Vietnamese students and the results of the new exam used instead of the previous one.

A representative of APMOPS said the organizing board in Vietnam has reported the trouble and is working with the Singaporean organizing board on a solution.

Thanh Hung