Ministry of Education verifies suspected exam score fraud in Son La and Lang Son

In two decisions signed this afternoon, Mr. Phung Xuan Nha, Minister of Education and Training, Head of the National High School Exam Steering Committee, stated that two working groups are responsible for assisting the Minister in directing the verification of unusual signs in exam results at the Examination Councils of the Departments of Education of Lang Son and Son La during the National High School Exam.

The working group includes officials from the Department of Quality Management, the Inspectorate of the Ministry of Education and A83 of the Ministry of Public Security. Tomorrow, these two groups will begin their work in the two localities.

TThe mountainous province of Son La has an average score of 4.21 for all national high school exam subjects, the lowest in the country. The average score for Math, Geography, and Civic Education is last among 63 provinces and cities; Foreign Languages ​​and Physics are 62nd; Literature, Chemistry, and History are 61st, and Biology is 51st.

However, the rate of Son La candidates achieving scores of 9 or higher isMath and Physics scores far exceeded those of some localities with a tradition of good learning. In Math alone, Son La had 30 students scoring 9 or higher, accounting for nearly 0.3%. Meanwhile, the rates in Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi and Nam Dinh were 0.04; 0.1 and 0.06, respectively.

In Physics, Son La had 13 students scoring 9 or higher, accounting for 0.97% of the total of nearly 1,340 candidates taking the exam. Meanwhile, with 37 times more exam papers (49,680), Ho Chi Minh City only had 39 students scoring 9 or higher, accounting for about 0.08%, 12 times less than Son La.

Strange ProvinceMr. Son was verified when 35 independent candidates taking the exam at the same school in the city had unusually high scores in Literature, History, and Geography. The History and Literature exams were considered difficult, the scores of most candidates were low, but the total scores of this group were all in the range of 24-27.

Thus, in just one week, the Ministry of Education had to establish three working groups to verify signs of irregularities in the national high school exam scores of three northern mountainous provinces. Ha Giang province, according to the announcement of the Evaluation Council, had 114 candidates with more than 330 exam papers with increased scores. The total score was increased from 1 to 29.95 compared to the evaluation score.

Based on the national high school exam regulations, the Council decided that the assessment results will be used to replace all multiple-choice test results announced by the Department of Education and Training's Examination Council on July 11. These test scores will be used to consider high school graduation and university, college and intermediate school admissions in 2018.

On the evening of July 17, the Prime Minister directed the Ministry of Public Security to coordinate with the Ministry of Education to investigate and strictly handle violations regarding national high school exam scores.