Numerous students, teachers, and youth union members at high schools around Ho Chi Minh City are complaining that they have got distracted from their core studies because so many extra-curricular competitions have been held since the beginning of this school year.

These complainers say that the competitions have had an adverse influence on their academic schedules even though they are meaningful to some extent. 

Since the beginning of this academic year in August, around 20 such contests have been organized at district and city levels.

Although most of them call for volunteer participants, students’ participation will be used as part of the benchmarks to judge their performance at the end of the school year.

An academic year in Vietnam usually ends in late May or early June.

A youth union member at a high school in District 10 said his school is pooling a group of 10th and 11th graders for a contest on the country’s history, geography, and culture.

The contest is being organized by the city Department of Education and Training in collaboration with national flag carrier Vietnam Airlines.

“Our school has participated in nearly 10 competitions like this,” a teacher at the school whined.

“Schools are tired of them now because it is hard to gather contestants and spend time and money on preparing them for those contests. Many students will have to skip their classes to join them,” the teacher added.

Meanwhile, a teacher in Go Vap District said the extra-curricular activities only become useful as intended when they are organized at the right time with school schedules and students’ studies taken into account. 

Teachers and their schools are very busy at this time of the year with enormous paperwork to complete so such contests only put more pressure on them, the teacher elaborated.

“Sometimes there are around ten contests overlapping one another in November or March but we cannot refuse to join because they are one of the criteria used to evaluate our year-end results,” he complained.

According to Truong Thi Hieu Hanh, responsible for extra-curricular activities at Nguyen Van Troi Elementary School in District 4, the participation in such contests would not affect participants’ main studies if schools could arrange time reasonably for them.

But those in charge of the teams to partake in these competitions are usually young teachers who have just graduated from universities with little experience so they cannot assure their students would not get distracted from their core academic duties, Hanh said. 

Le Tran Kieu Hoa, a teacher at Vo Truong Toan Middle School in District 1, noted that students enrolled at schools in downtown Ho Chi Minh City are to suffer the most from such competitions since they are already under high pressure from their parents to become high-achieving stars with a hectic schedule all day long.

In response, a staff from the high school department of the Ho Chi Minh City Department of Education and Training said all competitions call for voluntary participation only.

“Students are not forced to attend them,” he said. “The contests do not interfere in their studying, as they are appropriately organized over separate months throughout the year.

“They are playgrounds which create good conditions for students to express their skills, interests, and get career orientations for the future.”

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