Parents say Tran Dai Nghia 6th grade entrance exam 'has problems', what does Ho Chi Minh City Department of Education say?

The entrance exam for grade 6 of Tran Dai Nghia Secondary and High School (abbreviated as Tran Dai Nghia School) for the 2025-2026 school year ended 10 days ago. The Ho Chi Minh City Department of Education and Training also announced the exam scores and admission scores.

But up to now, some parents whose children took this survey still believe that the exam questions of the Ho Chi Minh City Department of Education and Training "have problems" that have affected their children's results.

On the morning of June 26, a group of parents in Ho Chi Minh City whose children took the entrance exam for grade 6 at Tran Dai Nghia School sent a petition and feedback about the exam questions and results to the Ho Chi Minh City Department of Education and Training.

According to parents, the first thing they find most confusing is that question number 2 in the "Math and Logical Thinking" test is unclear, leading to 3 answers, but when announcing the official answer, the Ho Chi Minh City Department of Education and Training only gave one answer. This affects the rights of candidates.

Specifically, the question asked: "How many different ways can you place 3 beans, each in a square in the image below, so that each row and each column has only one bean?". The answer initially given by the Ho Chi Minh City Department of Education and Training was "8 ways".

Meanwhile, many parents and experts believe that the answer to this exam has two more options: "0 ways" and "48 ways".

Parents also asked whether it was because the math test was so inaccurate that this year the Ho Chi Minh City Department of Education and Training did not announce the math, Vietnamese, and English questions of the survey like every year, but only announced the answers to the English, multiple choice, reading comprehension and writing, math, and logical thinking questions?

In addition, each question in the entrance exam for grade 6 at Tran Dai Nghia School this year does not have a score annotation; the distribution of the test sections between multiple choice and essay is also different from previous years.

"My child doesn't know how many points each question is worth, which affects his test-taking process. Why is the score chart in the test unclear?" - a parent complained.

Responding to the press on the morning of June 26, Mr. Nguyen Bao Quoc - Deputy Director of the Department of Education and Training of Ho Chi Minh City - said that the Department is meeting with parents to listen to their opinions and wishes.

For question 2, he said that the answer given by the Department was "8 ways". However, during the marking and reviewing process, the marking council found that some candidates gave answers of 0 ways and 48 ways, which were consistent with the logical thinking of the subject. Therefore, the marking council decided to accept all 3 results of 8, 0 and 48 ways. Thus, students were given 3 points according to the scoring scale of the survey with the above 3 results.