Radical innovation in university admissions

The high school graduation exam and university entrance exam are always of interest to the whole society, because they are directly related to the future of millions of candidates and their parents. Over the past 10 years, the Ministry of Education and Training has made many efforts to innovate the organization of exams and admissions and has also created positive changes, but objectively speaking, there are still many issues that have not met the expectations of society.

During the 2015-2016 period, the Ministry of Education and Training merged the high school exam and the university and college entrance exam into one national high school exam, which was organized by universities and colleges, and schools relied on the results of this exam for admission. During the 2017-2019 period, the exam format remained unchanged, but the Ministry of Education and Training assigned the organization to local departments of education and training.

And from 2020 to now, the national high school exam has been changed to the high school exam with the purpose of recognizing high school graduation, assessing the quality of general education and university admission. After many adjustments and changes in the technical stage of university admission, tragicomic events have occurred such as: candidates who scored 30 points/3 subjects still failed to pass the university entrance exam; regulations on publishing university admission application data have led to the situation of submitting applications in the morning and withdrawing applications in the afternoon, causing candidates and parents to watch the registration data like playing the lottery; cheating in exam marking has caused hundreds of university-passing candidates to be eliminated; the pedagogical sector lacks teachers but the annual enrollment quota keeps decreasing...

2025 is the year when the first batch of students following the new General Education Program will graduate from high school. According to information announced by the Ministry of Education and Training, next year's High School Graduation Exam will have two compulsory subjects: Math and Literature. In addition, candidates can choose two subjects from the general education program, including: Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Geography, History, Economic and Legal Education, Information Technology, Technology and Foreign Languages ​​(English, German, Russian, Japanese, French, Chinese, Korean). Regarding the method of considering high school graduation recognition, the Ministry said it will combine the results of the process assessment and the results of the graduation exam at an appropriate rate. In addition, the exam will maintain the paper-based exam format until 2030, after 2030, it will pilot computer-based exams with multiple-choice subjects.

When the high school graduation exam scenario changes, the university admission process will change accordingly. However, the issue of autonomy in admission (admission, entrance exam, combination of entrance exam and admission) according to the 2018 Law on Higher Education has not yet been decided by the Ministry of Education and Training. In recent years, the admission method based on the results of separate exams (competency assessment test, thinking assessment test), admission combined with many criteria has been applied by many universities; but currently many schools are still hesitant to announce or develop admission plans for 2025 for fear of "putting the cart before the horse" if the Ministry of Education and Training unfortunately has different instructions. This situation is not unprecedented, as in 2013, the Ministry of Education and Training urged schools to develop admission plans to replace the "3 common - common period, common questions, common results" admission, but immediately after that, all had to be shelved to select admissions based on the national high school exam from 2015.

In the innovation of high school graduation exams and university admissions, there seems to be a certain discrepancy between the set goals and the implementation, so each innovation encounters unfortunate incidents. Therefore, many opinions suggest that the Ministry of Education and Training assign university admissions to training institutions to decide; the Ministry only takes care of management, control of training quality, post-inspection of opening majors and construction, proposes policies for specific occupations, key national occupations... which is not without basis. All have placed their hopes on the Ministry of Education and Training's efforts to thoroughly innovate.

THANH HUNG

Source: https://www.sggp.org.vn/doi-moi-triet-de-cong-tac-tuyen-sinh-dai-hoc-post751812.html