A poll by Tuoi Tre newspaper and local sociologists has shown that 85 percent of test-takers agreed cheating dominated the 2012 high school graduation exam.

The results back up longheld beliefs that academic dishonesty runs rampant across the national exams, in which administrators appear eager to pass candidates to manufacture sky-high success rates.

To check the 98.97 percent success rate announced by the Ministry of Education and Training, the survey questioned 500 high school graduates from 36 provinces and cities who had sat for this year’s exam.

Among those surveyed, 84.2 percent said discussing test questions was rife, while 83.5 percent reported seeing their peers copy each other’s answers.

More than one-third (36.4 percent) said proctors watched test-takers deliberate over questions, and one-fourth (23.4 percent) confirmed the use of cheat sheets.

Nearly 1 million 12th-graders took the exams June 2 to 4.

In other examples of cheating, students brought in cellphones, while proctors ignored and sometimes provided the cheet sheets, which test-takers read in restrooms.

‘They told the truth’

The poll offers authentic and reliable information, said to Dr. Ho Thieu Hung, former director of the Ho Chi Minh City Department of Education and Training.

Similarly, professor Pham Minh Hac, chairman of the Vietnam Association of Former Teachers, said the near-perfect pass rate is impossible for the current educational system, whose quality is always a bone of contention.

"I think they all told the truth about the exam,” Hac said of the students polled.

A sociologist who helped conduct the survey said it might not speak for all exam candidates, but could be a preliminary answer to why the pass rate was so high.

"In fact, 500 is not a small sample,” said Dr. Trinh Hoa Binh, with the Vietnam Institute of Sociology.

The Hanoi People’s Court yesterday sentenced a young woman to 15 months of probation for joking that there might be a bomb in her luggage while she was onboard a plane last year.
Ho Thi Thanh Tuyen, 25 and from Da Lat, was charged with "disrupting airway traffic,” the court said.

In July 2011, shortly after taking her seat on a flight home from Hanoi, Tuyen reportedly held onto her baggage despite a flight attendant Bui Tuan Anh’s request that she store it. When the plane prepared to take off, Tuyen again refused, saying, "What would you think if there were a bomb in the bag and it exploded when I put it in the hold?”

When Anh asked Tuyen to repeat herself, she said she was only joking. But the flight attendant reported the remarks to chief pilot Ajay Trayan, who then halted the flight for safety reasons.

All 171 passengers returned to the terminal to wait three hours for security checks. After those yielded no explosives, officials handed Tuyen over to investigators.

Vietnam Airlines said the delay forced it to suspend three flights, losing more than VND304 million (US$14,600).

In court, Tuyen repeated her defense that she was only joking. She told the court her family was poor and she made just VND2 million ($96) a month.

But a Vietnam Airlines representative demanded she pay damages of VND100 million, which the court later approved.

The airline has seen a number of false bomb threats in recent years.

Nguyen Bang Viet, a former employee, received a similar sentence and fine in 2011, after he told a flight attendant, via text message, about a fake bomb that caused Vietnam Airlines to cancel a flight from Hanoi to Siem Reap.

In separate cases, two others also were punished last year on related charges, including a French passenger boarding a plane at Ho Chi Minh City’s Tan Son Nhat Airport.