Confused with Bac Giang's gifted student exam questions

This unusual essay topic was discussed on a literature forum and attracted thousands of comments from teachers and students.

According to the information on the exam, this is the exam to select the 2018 national excellent student team in Literature of the Department of Education and Training of Bac Giang.

The test was held on September 17 with a duration of 180 minutes for 2 questions.

Question 1 (8 points) is quite a strange question and confuses many people.

Excellent student exam of Bac Giang province.

The question asked: “Write an essay presenting your point of view on the issue suggested by the picture above.” Above this question is a picture of a paper boat tied under a bright light bulb.

Sharing with Vietnamnet, a leader of the Department of Education and Training of Bac Giang province said that the exam questions for selecting the national excellent student team in Literature this year were assigned to Bac Giang Specialized High School to be responsible for creating and organizing the questions.

Contacting this school, teacher Pham Thi Thanh Binh - head of the Literature group, also one of the members of the test-making team - said that this was indeed the test to select the team to compete in the national Literature competition for excellent students of Bac Giang province.

Ms. Binh said that this is an "open-ended question" - open in allowing students to choose the content to discuss and open in choosing the scope of materials, evidence from life, literature, and many other fields to include in their writing.

“The desire and purpose of those who set the questions is to give students the ability to observe, analyze, and connect details to find the most valuable issues, related to real social life, to discuss.”

Ms. Binh shared that when deciding to create this question, the question-making team also anticipated that it would cause difficulties for the graders.

Although the answer key of the exam also suggests some solutions to the question, “we determined that if the question is open, the answer must also be open. We discussed with the teachers who graded the test that when there are completely new ideas that do not match the answer key, but if the students argue logically and have satisfactory evidence, their answers will still be accepted. Our goal is for students to have the ability to think, argue about problems, and associate an image with social reality.”

It is known that this exam has 25 students participating and 10 students will be selected for the national excellent student exam team in Literature this year of Bac Giang province.

Immediately after the exam was posted, there were many teachers in the profession who were surprised, supporting and opposing this "innovation". Opposing opinions said that the exam had abused the "visual channel" unnecessarily. Some people compared the exam to the game of "catch the word".

As for the readers, many different hypotheses have also been put forward for the photo.

Among the nearly 1,000 comments, there are quite a variety of ideas.

La Ba Hien argued: “In my opinion, this picture is a simulation of the current social situation. The boat above represents the product created for everyone to use (the boat is equivalent to movement), the light bulb represents creativity, research, and manufacturers.

Every day, we use very useful tools such as motorbikes, laptops, TVs, airplanes, tractors, grinders... but we do not know that to have those things, it requires a process of hard work and diligence of creative minds. A product is created, supply and demand are always parallel, but do we care who is the "supply"?, "supply" like? or just spend money to buy a product, go online to listen to a melodious song without knowing who the author is?

Light bulbs - those silent creators, without them this society cannot develop, that is a certain bond (the tight rope between the boat and the light bulb). If we want society to develop, we need creativity, but for this creativity to be best developed, we must care about them, must know what they are doing and contributing.

Looking at it from another angle, Nguyen Duc Cuong thinks the message of this photo is as follows:

"Everyone has strengths and weaknesses, hidden abilities, creativity, talent... When we keep living at a safe level, clinging to the buoy, not daring to take risks, not daring to face challenges, we will never see our own potential, potential, and light. That light will forever be hidden under the shadow of our complacency and will never shine."

Meanwhile, Nguyen Hoang Tuan Kiet thinks that we are actually being distracted by the ups and downs of boats and light bulbs.

Tuan Kiet thinks that is not the meaning the author conveys:

“Do you remember the iceberg principle? Actually, we can see the light bulb as creativity, the instinctive, innate intelligence of humans. And the paper boat represents education, learning, and cultivation.

The light bulb is under the water, unable to determine the direction, even if it floats, it just floats aimlessly. The boat is the floating part that can navigate, can catch the wind, and can go where it wants. But on the contrary, the light bulb never gets wet, while the paper boat gets wet and torn easily, so it is necessary to combine both to avoid being crushed by the wind and waves, and to be able to reach the destination.

“The broad meaning of this photo is: human intelligence, creativity, effort, and endeavor are like hidden parts, like unpolished gems, which cannot be used to demonstrate their abilities, but must be studied, researched, cultivated, and polished to be successful.”

According to VNN