Is university admission based on transcripts still reliable?

In 2025, many universities announced to reduce admission quotas using high school transcripts or completely eliminate this admission method because the gap in transcripts between schools is large, leading to unfairness in admission.

More universities stop considering high school transcripts for admission

Ho Chi Minh City University of Education has just announced some changes in the planned enrollment plan for 2025 to meet the needs of students studying under the 2018 General Education Program.

Notably, in 2025, the school will not use high school academic results (report cards) in admission, only retaining the threshold conditions to ensure input quality.

In the orientation of using specialized competency assessment exams as the main method, the school will organize this exam as an independent exam.

Candidates taking the 2024 high school graduation exam. Photo: Le Khanh.

The school will adjust the admission combinations to suit the high school graduation exam subjects from 2025. In the immediate future, it will still ensure to maintain the admission combinations of 2024 in the methods using high school graduation exam scores suitable for the subjects from 2025. At the same time, the school will adjust the combinations that are no longer suitable, such as eliminating the combinations with the Natural Science exam, Social Science exam... and adding new combinations with the subjects of Economic and Legal Education, Information Technology, and Technology.

According to Ho Chi Minh City University of Education, the school has eliminated the consideration of high school transcripts in order to meet the needs of students studying under the 2018 general education program, with the general view of ensuring fairness, transparency, creating favorable conditions for candidates and ensuring improved input quality, meeting the requirements of the modern labor market.

Concerned about the quality of transcripts

Previously, some universities also announced plans to reduce admission quotas based on academic records or completely eliminate this admission method in their enrollment plans.

Ho Chi Minh City University of Industry and Trade announced that in 2025, the school plans to reduce enrollment quotas based on the 10th, 11th grade transcripts and the first semester of 12th grade to only 15-20% of the total enrollment quota.

In 2025, the National Economics University will continue to eliminate the high school transcript admission method and plans to keep 3 admission methods stable compared to 2024, including: direct admission; combined admission and admission based on high school graduation exam results in 2025.

With the admission method based on high school graduation exam results, the quota for considering high school graduation exam results will be reduced by 3% from 18% in 2024 to 15% in 2025.

From 2024, National Economics University will no longer consider admission based on academic records.

Explaining the removal of the method of considering academic records, the school representative said that through the admission results of the years, it shows that the group of candidates for specialized schools that consider admission based on academic records are very good, almost all of whom meet other conditions regarding test scores to assess capacity, high school graduation exam scores, international certificates, etc. The removal of this group of candidates is to reduce the virtual rate when filtering successful applications, with little impact on the overall admission results and the rights of candidates.

According to many candidates, eliminating the method of considering academic records is a disadvantage but also creates fairness in the upcoming university entrance race.

Nguyen Yen Nhi, a 12th grader at Nguyen Hue High School (Hanoi) said: “Each school will have different standards and evaluation methods based on scores. For example, a student who scores 10 at this school may not necessarily have better abilities than a student who scores 7 or 8 at another school. On the other hand, the exam questions at each school are also different. Therefore, I think that the admission quota based on academic records should be reduced compared to other admission methods to create fairness for candidates.”

In the past few admission seasons, university admission scores based on academic transcripts have been increasing continuously. Even in many majors, candidates with an overall score of 9.5 points/subject still fail the university entrance exam.

This makes the admission method based on high school transcripts face many conflicting opinions about the reliability of high school academic results.

Source: https://daidoanket.vn/xet-tuyen-dai-hoc-bang-hoc-ba-con-dang-tin-cay-10293743.html