Integral
(Baonghean.vn) - I am not lucky (or unlucky?) to experience the anxiety of university entrance exam candidates in Vietnam.
When I took the high school graduation exam in France, the feeling of pressure probably couldn't be compared to my peers in Vietnam. Over there, it was relatively easy to get into public universities, only a few schools that trained in specialized fields such as engineering, medicine, advanced pedagogy (yes, pedagogy) had a high level of difficulty and competition rate. Even before the exam, many of us had been accepted by many schools, just waiting for the graduation exam to score enough points to receive the diploma to complete the admission documents. When taking the graduation exam, we brought candy and soft drinks into the exam room (which is strictly allowed by law), and ate and drank while taking the exam, as long as we didn't eat things that made noise and affected other candidates like chips and hard nuts. The good thing about the graduation exam there was that it was organized very disciplined, each candidate had a separate table. Anyone caught cheating would be banned from taking the exam for several years. After the first round of exams, candidates who do not score within the required score will be allowed to retake the second round, or in other words, "pass by the skin of their teeth". I don't know about other schools, but in my school, only one student had to retake the second round.
If we say that the French high school curriculum is easier than the Vietnamese one, it is easy. But if we say that it is difficult, it is also difficult. The easy part is that the knowledge of basic sciences such as Math, Physics, and Chemistry is often not as deep as in Vietnam. At that time, my mother still sent me Vietnamese textbooks for grades 10, 11, and 12 in case I did not understand the French curriculum, I could read Vietnamese books. Unexpectedly, I learned the French curriculum easily, but when I opened the Vietnamese textbooks to read, I felt like I was on another planet. It was not until my second year of university that I was surprised when I was taught a lot of knowledge in Vietnamese textbooks for grades 11 and 12. So I breathed a sigh of relief, thinking to myself that it was a good thing I was studying abroad, otherwise if I had studied in Vietnam, I would not know how I would pass the university entrance exam.
But then there is also a problem, that very deep knowledge often only serves the specific majors that are differentiated at university level. But thinking back, why do 10th, 11th, and 12th graders need to learn matrices and spatial transformations? The proof is that after I changed my major at university, the knowledge of advanced Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry was quickly forgotten.
Honestly, if I had to choose one thing to learn when I was 16, 17, something really interesting, something really useful then and even later, I would rather learn to play a musical instrument or a sport than learn how to do integrals. What is an integral anyway?