Ministry of Education and Training 'finalizes' university admission regulations 2025: Eliminates early admission, converts equivalent scores

Students attend the 2025 Admissions and Career Counseling Day organized by Tuoi Tre newspaper and other units on March 16 - Photo: NGUYEN BAO

On March 21, the Ministry of Education and Training issued Circular No. 06 amending and supplementing a number of articles in the regulations on university and college admissions for preschool education.

Officially cancel early admission

This year, universities will no longer be allowed to consider early admission and must convert scores in all methods to a common scale according to the principles set forth by the Ministry of Education and Training.

The Ministry said these adjustments aim to increase transparency, fairness and improve the quality of admissions.

The decision to abolish early admission is based on the fact that in recent years, applying early admission makes the admission period longer, and candidates have to request confirmation of their high school academic results to many training institutions, leading to a waste of social resources.

In particular, many training institutions call for early admission in large numbers but the number of candidates enrolling is very small, showing that early admission is not effective.

"In addition, when training institutions conduct early admissions using the learning results from 1 to 5 semesters of high school instead of using the results of the entire 12th grade year (semester 2), it affects the learning process and high school graduation exams of students, thereby affecting their learning capacity at university level," the Ministry stated the reason for eliminating early admissions.

The new regulation also stipulates that when using high school academic results for admission, the candidate's entire 12th grade academic results must be used.

In addition, to ensure that the contribution of the 12th grade academic results is not too low when calculating the score, the regulations stipulate that the weight of the 12th grade academic results is not less than 25%.

Convert the admission score to the general scale

According to the new admission regulations, training institutions using multiple admission methods must determine the equivalent conversion rules for the input threshold and admission scores of the admission methods, admission methods, and admission combinations. according to general instructions of the Ministry of Education and Training.

Thus, schools do not have to allocate quotas for admission methods to avoid risks when considering admission according to the quotas of each method such as the difference in scores between methods being too large, some methods have very high admission scores, admission scores based on transcripts are lower than admission scores based on high school graduation exam results, etc.

In addition, to ensure that candidates have full information during the application process, the Regulations stipulate that the equivalence conversion rules must be publicly announced at the latest at the same time as the input quality assurance threshold is announced.

Candidates do not need to choose a method code, combination code... they just need to clearly identify the program, major, training group and training institution they want to study to decide to register. The general enrollment support system of the Ministry of Education and Training will use the method with the highest result of the candidate for admission consideration.

According to the Ministry of Education and Training, 2025 is the first year that biology courses under the new general education program (General Education Program 2018) will take the high school graduation exam. The Ministry of Education and Training has issued the Regulations on high school graduation exams from 2025, which will increase the number of subjects students can choose.

Therefore, to ensure admission opportunities for students from different regions, the regulation removes the requirement for training programs, each major and each program has a maximum of 4 admission combinations as in the draft; candidates are admitted with an unlimited number of admission combinations.

However, in order to ensure the quality and knowledge foundation necessary for university study, the regulations stipulate that the subject group used for admission includes at least 3 suitable subjects, including mathematics or literature with a weighted score of not less than 25%. From 2026, the common subjects of the groups must contribute at least 50% of the weighted score.

To limit the possibility of candidates' extra points being too large, causing unfairness, the regulations set a limit of the total extra points not exceeding 10% of the maximum score of the scoring scale (for example, with a 30-point scale, the maximum is 3 points) to create a fairer opportunity in the selection process.

Training institutions still have bonus points based on the characteristics of the training institution, input requirements and maximizing the candidates' individual strengths.

Each candidate has the opportunity to achieve the maximum score on the scoring scale, but no candidate has a score (all types of bonus points and priority points) exceeding this maximum score.

How to convert foreign language certificates in admission?

According to the Ministry of Education and Training, in the past few years, there has been a situation where some training institutions have abused the use of foreign language certificates in the admission process, even using foreign language certificates as the deciding criteria for candidates' chances of admission.

Meanwhile, access to foreign language certificates varies between students in different regions.

Therefore, the new regulation stipulates that schools can convert foreign language certificates into foreign language subject scores to include in the admission subject group, but the foreign language subject scores converted from foreign language certificates have a weighted score that cannot exceed 50%.

With this regulation, candidates can still make the most of their strengths to increase their chances of being admitted to university while still ensuring fairness.

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