Ministry accepts dual answers for high school English exam question

A multiple-choice question on the exam that required examinees to choose a word in a sentence that needs to be changed has sparked debate over the past week, with several students and teachers arguing about two particular options.

The question was to find a word that needs to be changed in the sentence: Their pioneering (A) research showed that the learning motivation of the two groups of learners was quite distinctive (B) from each other, and the comparative (C) group whose learning motivation was stronger performed better than the control (D) group.

Question 31 of the English high school graduation exam this year has attracted debate over which is the correct answer. Photo obtained by VnExpress

Two camps were split between answer B (distinctive) and answer C (comparative).

Lai Thi Phuong Thao, deputy headmistress of the Foreign Language Specialized School, said she knew the answer had to be “comparative.” From a structural standpoint, the correct answer should have been a noun to correspond with the word “control group,” she said.

“However, when I rechecked answer B, I found that ‘distinctive’ was not quite correct either as it does not go with ‘from’,” she said, adding that she and some other teachers have proposed that the Ministry of Education and Training to accept both B and C as the correct answers.

While the official answers released by the ministry on July 3 said the correct answer was B, on Wednesday, the ministry said both B and C would be accepted as the correct answers, according to a Facebook post on the ministry’s official account.

Over a million 12th-grade students across Vietnam took their high school graduation examination this year on June 28 and 29, with Foreign Language as the final exam. The test has 50 questions, testing examinees on their phonetics, grammar, vocabulary, reading and writing skills, among others.