SƠN LA — An official in Sơn La Province’s high school exam cheating scandal has admitted to destroying CD copies of answer sheets, in a cemetery.

Trần Xuân Yến, deputy director of the provincial Department of Education and Training, confessed to police on Wednesday that he had destroyed CDs with scanned images of the multiple choice answer sheets at a local cemetery.

Yến was one of five local educational officials prosecuted for interfering with the scores of the high school exam test in the province.

According to Tuổi Trẻ (Youth) newspaper, Yến was found to have adjusted scores of multiple-choice tests and increased marks of written literature tests in 13 cases.

On July 18, Yến instructed Nguyễn Thị Hồng Nga, an official of the local authority of examination and quality management and member of the multiple-choice test marking team, to save scanned images of multiple-choice answer sheets to 16 CDs and delete the original data from the computer.

The move aimed to hamper the inspection by a Ministry of Education and Training working group.

Yến then brought the CDs to a cemetery in Sơn La City and destroyed them.

According to police, besides charges of abusing position and power in performance of official duties, his action shows signs of stealing and destroying documents belonging to the education sector.

Earlier the education and training ministry’s inspection team found the answers of some students in multiple-choice tests were erased and had been modified before the answer sheets were scanned and sent to the ministry.

It was found that 12 of 110 highly suspicious literature tests had been marked higher than they should have been by at least one point. One test was a full 4.5 points higher than it should have been.

On Tuesday, police issued legal proceedings against five education officials of the province involved in the scandal.

Three officials were arrested and two others were banned from leaving their houses.

At a Government meeting on Wednesday, deputy minister of education and training Nguyễn Hữu Độ said the Ministry of Public Security has brought advanced technology to Sơn La to track down the original exam sheets data.

The recovery of the data will be conducted on the test scanning machine, he said.

Sơn La had more than 10,300 students participating in the national high school graduation exam this year with an average score of 4.21, the lowest in the country. The rate of students in Sơn La achieving nine points and beyond in maths and physics, however, outnumbered that of other localities that traditionally perform better.

Sơn La’s exam cheating scandal together with the one in northern Hà Giang Province has created one of the most serious education violations ever in the country. — VNS