The two top students in the entrance exam to Phan school are students from non-public schools.

Chemistry Valedictorian Once Considered Math His Strength

In this year's exam, among the 13 specialized classes of Phan Boi Chau High School for the Gifted, the Chemistry specialized class is the specialized class with the second highest "competition" rate, just behind the English specialized class.

This class is also considered to be very competitive because most of the students who register for the school are good students and many of them were valedictorians and salutatorians in the Provincial Excellent Student Competition...

What is quite surprising is that Tran Duong Manh - the valedictorian of this year's Chemistry class is a student at Hermann Gmeiner High School. In this school, each level has only 2 classes, the concept of "selective classes" is almost non-existent.

The only thing that made Manh confident when registering for Phan Boi Chau High School for the Gifted was the third prize in the provincial Chemistry competition for excellent students.

Recalling this exam, Manh also shared: "When I registered for the Chemistry major, I was quite worried because I knew there were many excellent students who had studied the major for many years."

Tran Duong Manh (middle) with the excellent faces of class 9A Hermann Gmainer High School. Photo: My Ha

This year's Chemistry exam was considered difficult and highly classified. Out of 20 questions, Manh did quite well in 12 of the theory questions. Of the 8 questions in the exercise section, Manh spent a lot of time on question 6, which Manh considered the most difficult. After finishing the exam, he also assessed himself as having got about 70-80% correct and was quite confident in his work.

However, when receiving the results, Manh was still very surprised because he did not think that his score was not only the top score in his specialized subject but also the top score in his specialized class at the school with a very high score of 49.80 points (8 points higher than the admission score).

Previously, Tran Duong Manh's strength was Math. However, from grade 8, when the curriculum started to include Chemistry, Manh switched to loving this subject because "Chemistry is close to life". Manh's classmates also said that Manh was very hard-working, often practiced and did many different types of exercises.

“Manh doesn't study much, instead, he spends a lot of time reviewing old knowledge, practicing test questions and practicing test-taking skills...”.

Ms. Duong Thi Hung - mother of Tran Duong Manh

Physics Valedictorian Rises from Failure

In the same class as Manh, Nguyen Dinh Duy Anh is also a special face when he won the valedictorian position in the Physics specialized class at Phan Boi Chau High School for the Gifted with 47.48 points.

In previous years, the list of successful candidates for this specialized class consisted mostly of students from specialized schools in the local areas. The number of students from other public schools was very small and the case of a student from a non-public school being the “valedictorian” like Duy Anh was truly rare.

Talking about Duy Anh, teacher Ngo Thi Thuy - the class's homeroom teacher is very proud of this especially intelligent and hard-working "class monitor". She also added: "If Manh Thi Phan was motivated by winning the third prize in the provincial Chemistry competition, Duy Anh came to the competition from "failure".

The main reason is that Duy Anh once ranked 2nd in the city in the Excellent Student Competition, but then, when taking the second round to select the provincial team, Duy Anh was not successful. That was a valuable experience for Duy Anh to study better and do better in his exam."

Teacher Ngo Thi Thuy (far left) and excellent students of class 9A. Photo: My Ha

The class has up to 17 students passing the entrance exam to specialized schools.

Not only having two valedictorians, this school year, class 9A - Hermann Gmeiner High School also created a miracle when 11 students passed the entrance exam to Phan Boi Chau High School for the Gifted and 6 students passed the entrance exam to Vinh University High School for the Gifted.

Among them, there are many outstanding faces such as Chu Thi Thuy Quynh, who passed the French specialized class despite only studying for a year, and Ho Nguyen Phat, who won second prize, was an excellent student in the province in English, and passed the English specialized class. Many other students also passed the Biology specialized class, Literature specialized class, and Math - IT specialized class./.