News and Events

Most schools in large cities have reported that 90 percent of their students are considered excellent, a figure described as “abnormally high”.

Le Ngoc Han Primary School in district 1 of HCM City has reported that in the last 10 years, the number of excellent students had been higher than 90 percent of total students. The number of poor students was so low that it “can be counted on one’s fingers”.

In district 5, the number of excellent and good students at the Chinh Nghia Primary School was 94 percent in the 2014-2015 academic year, which has just concluded.

Tran Quoc Thao Primary School in district 3 also reports 90 percent of excellent students.

Not only primary schools, but high schools have also witnessed the increasingly high proportion of excellent students.

Tran Dai Nghia High School for the Gifted had 78 percent of excellent students and 21 percent good students in the 2012-2013 academic year. It hopes the number of excellent students would be 80 percent in 2015 and 90 percent by 2020.

Excellent students are those who have a GPA (grade point average) of at least 8.0. This means that students need to be excellent in all learning subjects.

An education expert noted that in most cases students at the schools for the gifted are only good in their major subjects, and very few students are good in all 9-10 subjects.

However, there are still many students winning the “excellent student” title. And this is because teachers “give bonus marks to them” to fabricate good learning records.

Nguyen Thi Thu Cuc, headmaster of Gia Dinh High School, has reported 70 percent  excellent students in 2014-2015 academic year.

A high school teacher in Hanoi said he was asked by the headmaster to give high marks so the students will have better opportunities to apply for prestigious schools.

Quang Phung, a parent in Hanoi, said his son, like the majority of classmates, has obtained the “excellent student” title. However, though the boy has been an excellent student over the last seven years, Phung is anxious about the boy’s learning capability.

“I know how teachers prepared my son and his classmates for the year-end exam. Students were asked to write essays at home and submit them to the literature teacher for editing. Then they just needed to learn the edited stories by heart and write them down at the exam, because the exam questions were exactly the same as the topics of the essay they prepared before,” Phung explained.