Last month, a farmer in southern Phú Yên Province surprised everyone with the successful demonstration of a machine he designed and made for sugarcane cultivation. The machine turns the soil, digs furrows and throws soil back after the sugarcane is planted. It works with a driver sitting in front and two people sitting behind to place the sugarcane cuttings in the soil.

Phi Anh Ð?, 40, a mechanic in the central coastal province’s Son Nguy?n Commune, is a school dropout. His academic pursuit stopped after primary school. However, this has not prevented him from fashioning several machines that can considerably ease a farmer’s workload and make farming more efficient. Ð?’s new machine made headlines in Vi?t Nam shortly after the Web of Science, a multidisciplinary research platform which enables simultaneous cross-research of a range of citation indexes and databases, announced that over 15,000 papers by Vietnamese scholars have been published in international journals over the last five years.

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While this marks an annual increase of 17 per cent, Vi?t Nam has been left behind by neighbouring countries in terms of both quantity and quality.

The number of internationally published papers equal one third of Thailand, a quarter of Malaysia, one fifth of Singapore, and twenty five times less than South Korea. Vi?t Nam’s population is seventeen times that of Singapore, three times that of Malaysia, and almost one and a half times Thailand.

According to a study by Scientomatrics for Vi?t Nam (S4VN), a project that provides information on scientific research results by Vietnamese universities and science research units, the rate of Vietnamese scientific papers published in Q1 journals (leading journals in the ISI system) dropped from 41 per cent in 2010 to 38 per cent in 2015. This means that despite the increase in the number of papers published in international ISI publications, a larger percentage is in the “second class” category.

In effect, it also means that an “uneducated” farmer-mechanic like Ð? is putting one over the nation’s 9,000 or so professors and associate professors, 24,000 PhD holders and more than 100,000 Masters degree holders. Also around this time, a group of independent researchers announced their findings after spending three years collecting data and conducting a ranking of 49 universities in Vi?t Nam.

The results shocked many and stirred up a controversy among educators over the study’s credibility. For instance, Hu? University was ranked third in the quality of training although its College of Education had very low admissions standards this year. It was accepting high school students with just 12.75 marks out of 30 (42.5 per cent).