Le My Phong, Deputy Director of the Quality Management Department, Ministry of Education and Training, announced on the afternoon of 12/6 that 74 candidates nationwide were disqualified from the high school graduation exam this year. This marks an increase of 43 compared to last year. Among them, 69 students brought phones, and the remainder brought unauthorized documents into the examination room.

According to regulations, these candidates will have all their exam results canceled. This means 12th-grade students will not be recognized as having graduated high school and will have no results for university or college admissions.

Despite the rise in candidates bringing phones into the examination room, the Ministry affirmed that all incidents were detected promptly. "To date, no information regarding leaked or compromised exam questions on the Internet has been detected, unlike in previous years", Phong stated. "The exam proceeded as planned, safely and seriously".

In recent years, high-tech cheating in exams has become complex, with frequent suspicions of leaked exam questions. Last year, a male student in Lam Dong was prosecuted for using a 'bean' earphone and a micro camera, connected to a phone, to transmit the literature exam questions externally, asking a friend to solve them using Chat GPT.

In addition to the disqualified candidates, over 10,000 others skipped the exam.

Candidates taking the 2026 high school graduation exam in TP HCM. Photo: Quynh Tran

The high school graduation exam took place on 11-12/6, with over 1,2 million candidates participating. Candidates will receive their graduation exam scores on 1/7 and can register their university admission preferences until 17h on 14/7. University admission benchmarks and individual pass-fail results for each candidate will be announced after 17h on 9/8.

Duong Tam - Thanh Hang