Vietnam - Vietnam to ditch entrance exams by 2020: ministry

Vietnam will use high school academic records, instead of entrance exams, to enroll students for higher education by 2020, the Ministry of Education and Training (MoET) said Tuesday at a meeting in Hanoi attended by university and junior college presidents.

Only top-tier and research-oriented universities would be permitted to use admission tests for enrolling students by then, MoET affirmed.

The rest would recruit students based on their performance in high school, which Vietnam’s neighbors and many developed countries are doing, it said.

This ‘reform’ comes many years after public suggestions that enrolling students on the grounds of their high school academic record would be much fairer and cheaper than organizing entrance exams.

The central education watchdog also announced many changes to the current national entrance exams it holds annually in July to recruit university students.

More subjects, accordingly, would be added to selection tests so that both candidates and higher education institutions would have more options when it comes to enrollment, the ministry said.

To be admitted to a particular junior college or university, Vietnamese high school graduates are required to sit for a set of three MoET tests on math, physics, chemistry, biology, literature, history, geography, and foreign languages (either English, German, French, Japanese, Russian, or Chinese), depending on their majors.

The ministry also said that it would consider letting some specialized universities offer vocational courses, and that those students who win prizes in national academic contests would be granted automatic admission to university as before.

It previously banned universities from running such courses due to complaints from vocational schools, whereas the ministry had stopped awarding automatic admission to national contest winners from 2007.

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