Cheating scandal in Son La exam scores: Difficult to return real scores

Waiting for police investigation

Violations were discovered in the national high school exam marking process in Ha Giang (top row) and Son La (bottom row).

According to Mr. Dao Tuan Dat (lecturer at University of Science and Technology, Head of the Executive Board of Einstein High School (Hanoi), the violations in editing exam scores in Ha Giang and Son La are not the same.

First, the multiple-choice test scoring process goes through 4 steps: Scan the candidate's test, transfer this image file to the computer to convert from image to text file, then put it into the automatic scoring machine to get the score.

In Ha Giang, Mr. Vu Trong Luong intervened in the editing step 2, which is the stage of converting the image into text. Therefore, when the incident was discovered, it was easy to compare the edited score with the original test.

However, with the violation in Son La, the person who edited the score intervened and erased the original test paper, so it is very difficult to detect which edits were made by the candidate and which were made by an outsider.

Marking the 2018 National High School Exam in Hoa Binh. (Photo: My Ha).

“I think we can detect signs of erasure with the naked eye because with 50 questions, it would take a lot of time for one person to erase, so it would not be clean. Meanwhile, if the candidate erased, he would be more careful.

The difficulty is that there is no basis to assert that the erasure was caused by an outsider if the fraudulent act was not recorded by camera.

The only way left is to wait for the investigation and handwriting appraisal of the Ministry of Public Security as well as the need to investigate from the Marking Council because I think these people will have a list of candidates who need to have their scores corrected and how much. This is the only way faster than having to re-appraise the handwriting on thousands of multiple choice tests.

Mr. Vu Khac Ngoc, an education expert in Hanoi, also admitted that it is very difficult to correct the original exam scores in Son La to the real score because it is difficult to confirm which handwriting is the candidate's and which is the interventionist's. "If we examine the handwriting on thousands of multiple-choice exams, I think it will be very difficult. Therefore, based on conjecture, I think that only a few exams with very clear signs of editing can find the real score, while some others will be difficult," said Mr. Ngoc.

How to fix the "hole" in multiple choice scoring?

Mr. Bui Viet Ha, Director of School Information Technology Company - School@net, said that after knowing clearly the loopholes that lead to cheating on exam scores, he made some contributions to the process and program - multiple-choice exam scoring software of the Ministry of Education and Training.

It is very difficult to edit the original exam scores in Son La to return them to the real scores because it is difficult to confirm which corrections are made by the candidate and which are made by the person who intervened. (Illustration: My Ha).

According to Mr. Ha, there are two most obvious loopholes, the easiest to cheat, and need to be changed.

Firstly, the test paper does not have a bar, so the candidate information (SBD) is always displayed on the screen during the scanning, identification, and editing process. Therefore, this needs to be fixed immediately, so that when moving to the identification step before marking, the candidate information is hidden from the screen. There are many solutions to this problem.

Second, in the automatic marking step: There are two loopholes here: the input data of the marking program is a text file, so it can be easily hacked and modified, and second, humans, humans who intentionally cheat will find every way to do it. Letting the councils directly operate the final marking program is a big loophole.

From the above two points, Mr. Bui Viet Ha gave specific suggestions for the Ministry's marking process and marking method to be changed.

There needs to be an additional technique that allows the recognition to be divided into two phases after scanning the candidate's test (sent to the original Department): the general information phase (top bar) and the test section below.

When identifying the test below, the candidate's information needs to be erased, hidden, or obscured from the screen (and possibly the image as well). This adds an extra layer of security to the process.

Second, the final, direct marking by machine should not be left to the localities or examination councils. All final marking should be transferred to the Ministry and the marking should be centrally processed in the Ministry's computer room. Thus, the examination councils will only preliminarily process the marking information.

According to Mr. Ha, the problem is how far the Councils will process it before sending it back to the Ministry. It can be done as follows: the Councils will process it until they can produce the candidates' test files. If these files are text files, they need to be encrypted immediately before sending it back to the Ministry. This encryption needs to be done automatically in the program.

“Of course nothing is absolute, but if we can do the above, I think cheating will be much more difficult,” Mr. Ha shared.