Two weeks ago, we discussed the race in getting kids a good seat at a Hanoi school. Fast forward to this week, we meet students at Doi Ngo high school in Bac Giang Province sitting the graduation exam. A clip shows students exchanging cheat sheets as proctors turn a blind eye. Is it what parents expect to see after sponsoring their children to 12 years of education? Freshman Minh Tu expressed her disappointment at the annual graduation exam, wondering why there is always something wrong in every exam season: debate over the test’s subject, or changing the marking schemes, and this year the leak of a video showing students cheating during the test. She took examples of the Australian testing system she has heard from a friend there: “Teachers do not tip off students, proctors do not watch strictly, and no one uses cheat sheets. Results from the exam will be used for high school graduation and university entrance. To get into college, the academic performance of 12 years is also considered so students cannot play for the whole year and then only study for the final exam,” wrote Tu. Yet it is still hard to employ such testing system in Vietnam, where it may take a long run for students to be honest in exams, to refrain themselves from peeking at someone else’s test or to use cheat sheets. As a lecturer, CG Fewston shared his story when he showed a student the original document from which she copied and pasted and passed as her own. “Stunned and ashamed, she looked at the highlighted passages on her essay and at the highlighted passages I had printed out from the internet. She told me that her husband wrote the paper. This is probably the lowest form of plagiarism I could imagine. I informed her not to come back to my class until she was ready do the work herself and to learn how to do research and to write professionally. She never came back,” he shared. Fewston thinks that the students should not be responsible for plagiarism alone. The instructor should also be held responsible for not checking for plagiarism or teaching about ethics, which is one course rarely offered in universities. Scott Harris thinks that professors can use technology against students’ cheating as signs of plagiarism proliferated. “Like a supercharged Google, sophisticated search technology can compare a student’s or for that matter a professor’s work to a vast database of published literature and sniff out both verbatim copies and work that seems suspiciously familiar, ” he wrote. This would prevent further cheating attempts made by students , who later graduate and follow careers like writer, journalist or researcher. Yes, we are referring to a more severe case of physicist Le Duc Thong, who has been found copying from different foreign scientific articles. Evidence of plagiarism has caused six scientific journals to retract or reject seven papers bearing Thong’s name in the past two years. Indeed, it is essential to teach kids to be honest at an early age. Making them know the importance of morals and ethics in life is a way of providing them a good education, thus preparing for them a bright future ahead. Do you have any comments, ideas, opinions regarding this matter. Send an email to expat@tuoitre.com.vn. Have a nice weekend, everyone.