Why are there many good students?

At the National Assembly forum, a delegate said that education is not practical, finding weak students is as difficult as "finding a needle in a haystack". After 33 years of teaching, teacher Nguyen Van Luc (Trinh Phong Secondary School, Dien Khanh, Khanh Hoa) explained this situation.

Scores of 10, many excellent students come from the disease of achievement in education. Homeroom teachers want the class to have many excellent students to be praised by the board of directors for good teaching, solid skills, enthusiasm, which is also the year-end competition criteria. Subject teachers give scores of 10 to achieve the quality target of the subject they teach. Principals always want the school to have many excellent students at school, district, and provincial levels to be included in the criteria for ranking the school's titles at the end of the year.

Teachers are the ones who hold the scales of justice, but sometimes because they love their students, they do not take the tests and grading seriously and strictly, especially for regular test scores (coefficient 1). Many teachers are "creditors" of students' scores. When they check the old lesson, if the students do not study, instead of giving them a bad score, they let them owe the score so that they can retest the next day and get a 9-10. This is a good thing, but in theory it is not right.

Score 10, good students come from achievement disease in education.

At the end of every year, many homeroom teachers ask for points for students to achieve the title of excellent student, with the reason that if the student is 0.1, 0.2... short of 8 points, they are good enough to be excellent. Many schools also stipulate that if more than 2/3 of the class's test scores are below average, the school can re-test to get better scores. These actions of teachers are one of the reasons contributing to the inflation of excellent students. Contributing to the increasing number of excellent students is the assessment and classification regulations according to Circular 58/2011. Specifically, Article 13 of the criteria for grading semesters and the entire school year stipulates that students are excellent if they meet the following criteria:

a) Average score of all subjects is 8.0 or higher, in which the average score of one of the two subjects Math or Literature is 8.0 or higher; for students in specialized classes of specialized high schools, the additional condition of average score of specialized subject is 8.0 or higher;

b) No subject has an average score below 6.5;

c) Subjects assessed by passing comments.

Because of the average score calculation, many students only need to diligently study History, Geography, Civics to make up for the difficult subjects Math, Literature, English to achieve an average score of 8.0 or higher.

On the students' side, although not all, many students have been dishonest in various ways in tests to get high scores, to deal with teachers and parents. I have discovered many students with all kinds of forms of copying their friends' papers and documents during tests, many students use their phones to take pictures of documents for use in a very sophisticated way. If not detected, a score of 9 or 10 is certain, so parents should not consider scores as a measure of their children's ability.

Which parent is not proud and honored when their child achieves good and excellent academic results? To achieve that, many people compete to send their children to extra classes, to practice for exams at school, centers, and at home. No matter where they study, parents do not forget to register their children to study with teachers in class, whether they like it or not, in the hope that teachers will pay attention to their children in the main class to get their children's attention, high scores, and excellent students.

The pressure on students is not just the issue of ranking based on average scores at the end of the semester or year, but also comes from the achievement mentality of teachers and parents... so that everyone has to chase after scores.

From the perspective of both a teacher and a parent, I hope that we can restore fairness in teaching and learning, that is, teachers must follow the motto: Real teaching - real learning - real testing - real quality so that students are truly happy when going to school.