This afternoon (September 28), the Ministry of Education announced the 2017 national high school exam plan.

Minister Phung Xuan Nha said that this year's exam will be a combination of subjects, and it is expected that the integrated exam will be held three years later. The roadmap will be carefully calculated and announced specifically to avoid shock to teachers and students.

This afternoon, September 28, the Ministry of Education and Training held a press conference, officially announcing the plan for the 2017 national high school exam after a period of collecting opinions.

Previously, according to the draft released on September 8, the exam was assigned to the provincial Department of Education to preside over, take place in June and reduce from 4 days to 2 days.

The Ministry plans to reduce the 8 exam subjects to 5 exams including Math, Literature, Foreign Language, Natural Science (combination of Physics, Chemistry, Biology) and Social Science (combination of History, Geography, Civics).

Apart from the 120-minute essay test in Literature graded by the teacher, the remaining four tests are all objective tests, done on paper and graded by computer. Math has a total of 50 questions to be done in 90 minutes, Foreign Language has 40 questions to be done in 60 minutes. The remaining two tests each have 60 questions to be done in 90 minutes.

On the afternoon of September 28, 12th grade students will know the plan for the 2017 national high school exam. Photo: Giang Huy.

Minister Phung Xuan Nha saidEach exam room will have 30 candidates, each with their own exam code to ensure fairness. The exam content is different, but the difficulty is the same.The ratio of similar questions between the tests is about 15%, not simply reversing the positions of the multiple choice questions.To create this test bank, the questions were prepared through 6 rigorous steps.

According to Mr. Nha, the degreedifficult to calculate by multiple choice measurement, has been tested for 3 years at Hanoi National University and invery basic level, not challenging, those with superior abilities can go to university."This is an exam that experts and I affirm is superior, guaranteed to be serious, and will be graded by machine after the exam. Moving forward, we will use machine to grade the exam as we have done in the past few years," the Minister of Education affirmed.

Mr. Nha said that this year's exam is only a combination, so students and teachers will have time to prepare for teaching and learning. The Ministry plans to organize the integrated exam three years later. The roadmap will be carefully calculated and announced specifically to avoid shocking teachers and students. The Minister believes that in about three or four years, the exam issue will no longer be as hot as it is now.

The combination of the subjects into two exams, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences, and the organization of a completely multiple-choice test for Mathematics and Foreign Languages, has caused public opinion to be divided. The Association of Universities and Colleges supports multiple-choice tests for all subjects, and even proposes multiple-choice tests for Literature. Meanwhile, the Vietnam Mathematical Associationproposed to postpone the Math test in 2017, on the grounds that the test format is not highly classified. The change from essay to multiple choice is difficult.i does not have enough scientific basis will cause social panic.Public opinion is troubled with a series of questionsWhy do exam methods keep changing?, what will happen to the question making process, how will schools select candidates, will this innovation really reduce pressure?

Before 2014, Vietnam had 13 consecutive years of university entrance exams in the form of 3 common: common questions, common exam sessions and common exam results. After the local high school graduation exam at the end of June, in July, candidates will take university and college entrance exams at certain exam clusters, with the exam duration of one and a half days.

Since 2015, the Ministry of Education and Training has combined the graduation and university and college exams into one, called the national high school exam. Candidates take the exam in early July at local clusters (for those who are only considering graduation) and clusters hosted by universities (for those who are considering both graduation and university admission). In addition to the three compulsory subjects of Math, Literature, Foreign Language and one optional subject for graduation, candidates can choose the following subjects: History, Geography, Physics, Chemistry, Biology for university admission. The total exam time is 4 days.

According to VNE