Is the Ministry of Education truly ready for exam score lookup?

By 5:22 PM on July 22nd, many readers contacted VietNamNet reporting that although they could access the Ministry of Education and Training's portal, they were unable to enter the verification code, receiving an invalid code message even though their registration number was entered correctly.

Explaining this situation, Nguyen Phong Dien, Head of the Training Department at Hanoi University of Science and Technology, said:

“Our computer system was designed to serve approximately 50,000 students. Currently, the number of regular users is in the hundreds of thousands, so the school is overwhelmed. The technical team has mobilized all resources, but we are unable to cope. Besides the server system, data transmission also involves the fiber optic cable system. Upgrading it is not possible immediately.”

According to Mr. Dien: "Now, the only way is to wait 1-2 days for the traffic to decrease before people can view the exam results. However, it's almost August 1st, when universities and colleges start receiving applications for the first round of admissions. Therefore, the network congestion and inability to view exam results are expected to remain severe."

The Ministry of Education and Training is handling the technical aspects.

On the afternoon of July 22nd, when contacted by phone, the leaders of the Ministry of Education and Training only provided a brief statement stating that the Ministry was currently "handling the technical aspects" of the matter.

Previously, at a press briefing on July 21st, in response to a question about candidates' concerns that the national high school exam score lookup website would become congested due to high traffic, Mr. Mai Van Trinh, Director of the Department of Examination and Quality Assurance (Ministry of Education and Training), stated that the portal was designed to ensure smooth operation.

Mr. Trinh predicted that candidates would access their exam results frequently during the first three days. The Ministry cannot guarantee smooth 24/7 operation throughout the entire process without congestion, but assures that candidates can easily access their results without difficulty.

What's the solution?

Nguyen Phong Dien, Head of Training at Hanoi University of Science and Technology, believes that if the Ministry allowed universities to announce the scores to candidates immediately after grading, things would be much smoother. Centralizing the data on a single server at the Ministry of Education and Training caused the thi.moet.gov.vn website to experience network congestion during the trial run.

The website for checking exam results at Thai Nguyen University, even after multiple attempts, only displays the exam result lookup section like this.

Meanwhile, some candidates were able to access the Ministry's website but were unable to check their scores.

"We understand and agree that the Ministry needs comprehensive data for convenient and beneficial analysis and evaluation. However, this approach needs improvement."

Here, the Ministry failed to consider the technical aspects when centralizing the data for announcing exam results, leading to overload. Remember when we started the "three-subject" university entrance exam system, the data was centralized on a single website. As soon as the access address was announced, the system for viewing scores crashed."

"A simple solution is for universities to grade the exams and announce the results themselves," shared a technology expert who has been involved in the university entrance exam since 2002.

According to Vietnam.net