Teachers face enormous pressure from the school management to give their students a good record of academic achievements, Anh Minh, a teacher, has written to Tuoi Tre to complain.

As she pointed out, they have to meet a lot of ‘unrealistic and unreasonable’ figures every academic year if they do not want their professional standing to suffer.

The school would criticize them for not fulfilling their teaching duty if the number of students in their class with a “fair” GPA at the end of the school year falls below an arbitrary 85 percent cutoff mark, the teacher said.

They will not be given certificates of good teaching performance unless 90 percent or more of their students have earned a “fair” or better GPA, she added.

No excuse or justification will be accepted if they did not make the cut, Minh said.

Salary review is the driving force at the end of the day, she explained. When your prospect of a pay raise is tied to your teaching performance, the more ‘grade inflation’ they help to inflate, the sooner you will get a raise, she elaborated.

Gone is the time when students worked hard and strived to get good grades; today teachers sweat more than their students when it comes time for them to take an exam, Minh lamented.

As a result, students today become increasingly ill-behaved and unruly. They do not care about their studies anymore, and teachers are afraid of their students instead of the other way round, she said.