Secondary school graduates finished the high school entrance exams on June 21-22 already. However, the students and their parents are still in the state of anxious suspense. As for many parents, entering state owned schools is the only choice for their children.

The high school entrance exam is considered the second toughest and most important exam for students, just to the university entrance exam. Since the number of state owned schools is limited, students have to compete with each other to scramble for the seats there. In Hanoi and HCM City, the existing state owned high schools only can receive 70 percent of secondary school graduates, while the other 30 percent would have to go to people-founded schools or continuation schools.

Children take exams, parents suffer anxiety

That explains why not only students, but their parents also have to prepare well for the exam.

In Hanoi, nearly 80,000 students attended the exam, but only 70 percent of them would be enrolled in state owned schools.

The thinking of many parents is that the entrance exam to high school is an all-out exam. The parents do not want their children to go to people founded schools, because most of the schools are believed to have bad schooling environments. Meanwhile, prestigious people founded schools always require high tuitions which is unaffordable to many families. 

Therefore, students need to pass the exam to enter state owned schools, which do not set overly high tuitions and can provide good education environment.

Most of students said they have to attend private tutoring classes to prepare for the entrance exam. 

Ha, a parent in Dong Da district, who was seen waiting to pick up her daughter from the tutoring class at 9.30 pm, said that this was the third learning shift of the girl of the day.

“She went to an English class in the morning, then to literature class in the afternoon, and now at a math lesson,” she said.

“My daughter now has to prepare thoroughly for the exam. If you do not go to private tutoring class, you would have no opportunity to pass the exam, especially the exam to high school for the gifted,” Ha said.

She went on to say that she has put off everything to spend time to bring the daughter to classes and pick her up from school.

“The most important thing for us now is education of the daughter, not the business,” she explained.

Meanwhile, the parents from well off families from other provinces have also brought their children to the exam preparation centers in Hanoi, believing that the centers in big cities would be more helpful than in rural areas.

The Doan Ket High School in Hai Ba Trung district plans to enroll 800 students who registered to study at the school as their first choice. Tran Hung Dao School would receive 900 students as their first choice and 2800 students as their second choice (The students, who do not obtain enough exam marks to enter some high schools, would be able to register to study at other schools, if they can satisfy the requirements of the other schools).

In principle, the students, who want to study at a school at their second choice, would have the exam marks higher by 1.5 marks at least than the school’s required marks, to be eligible for studying at the school. Therefore, a lot of parents decided to choose the “safe option”, i.e. that they register to attend the exams to medium-class schools, which do not require overly high exam results.

Source: KT&DT