From June 11 to 13, Nga and her husband had to take it in turns to bring their daughter to the Hanoi-Amsterdam and Nguyen Tat Thanh Schools to attend entrance exams to schools.

Diep, the girl, registered to attend the entrance exams to both schools for the gifted.

“I hope my daughter can pass the exams to at least one of the two schools,” Diep’s mother explained. “I don’t want to send her to a normal school, where the schooling environment is worse”.

According to the Hanoi Education and Training Department, 108,700 students will enter the sixth grade, an increase of 22,000 compared with the last year. The competition to enter the schools, therefore, has become stiff.

The Hanoi-Amsterdam High School for the Gifted, believed to be the best high school in Hanoi, plans to enroll 200 students, while it has received 4,156 applications. Meanwhile, 2,599 students have registered to attend the entrance exams to the Nguyen Tat Thanh Secondary School, 200 more students over 2013, and 2,020 will attend the exam to the Cau Giay Secondary School.

Hanoians complained that the doors to star secondary schools for their children are getting narrower, while only very excellent students can enroll in the schools.

Nga said her daughter cannot relax though the summer holiday has begun. The girl has to go to private tutoring classes every day to prepare intensively for star school entrance exams.

“She needs to get familiar with different styles of questions to defeat thousands of rivals to be able to squeeze into a prestigious school,” she said.

“My daughter finished primary school as an excellent student. However, it is not enough: all the candidates are good and excellent students,” she explained.  

Nguyen Thi Chin, a mother in Bac Tu Liem District, also said all of the family’s members are under pressure because of upcoming exams that her daughter attends.

To prepare for the exam, Chin’s daughter has had three hours of learning with a private tutor every week.

The mother does not think going to exam preparation centers is a good idea. She decided to hire a tutor, who can give answers to all of her daughter’s questions.

Commenting about the race for prestigious secondary schools, Associate Prof Van Nhu Cuong, a well-known educator, said: “Many parents told me that the race for primary and secondary schools proves to be even tenser than the national university entrance exam”.

The main reason behind this, according to Cuong, is the big difference in the education quality of schools. The prestigious schools are the ones which can offer better learning and teaching conditions.  In the schools, students can learn in classes with 20-35 students each. In other schools, there are 50-60 students in every class.

Vietnamese parents are now willing to pay more money for schooling, hoping that their children can go on to tertiary education. However, a recent report showed that 72,000 bachelor’s degree graduates are unemployed.