Choosing and changing your 10th-grade college application preferences: It's time for more careful planning.
Changing your college application preferences to better suit your preferred schools or to ensure success in the 10th grade entrance exam has become commonplace for students in recent years, especially at the high school level.
This is an effort to create more opportunities for students to continue their education in public schools after completing lower secondary education. Some localities still allocate a certain amount of time for candidates to consider their options. The choice may be based on various criteria that students and their families can use as a basis, such as the likelihood of admission, financial capacity, transportation conditions, etc.
This approach first and foremost demonstrates strategic calculations with a humanitarian significance: it allows candidates to make the most suitable choices for themselves and their families; and it reflects the spirit of the Party and the State regarding everyone's right to education.
On the other hand, it also creates opportunities for "lower-tier" schools to open up more enrollment opportunities, while avoiding the gloomy situation and the anxiety of school administrators and staff about whether they can recruit enough students to maintain or enhance the school's reputation and brand.
On the other hand, to some extent, by improving the quality of admissions, the school can still recruit students whose abilities and skills are sufficient to compete with other schools, including public schools, in annual competitions such as the student excellence competition or the science and technology innovation competition.
This means that this policy will help narrow the gap between "top-tier" and "lower-tier" schools, public and private schools, and general education and continuing education... If based on reasonable calculations, it will have positive effects not only on the development of a specific educational institution, but also make a very important contribution to raising the intellectual level of the population and other contributions to the economic, cultural, and social life of a region.
However, it is evident that allowing candidates to change their preferences currently still has some drawbacks and negative consequences.
Firstly, the implementation is uneven across localities nationwide. During the recent university entrance exam in Hanoi, "many candidates and parents wondered why there wasn't a policy allowing candidates to adjust their preferences like in some other localities." Meanwhile, in Ho Chi Minh City, candidates were allowed to change their preferences, but only before the exam. Some other localities, such as Nghe An, allowed candidates 3 to 5 days after the exam to change their preferences.
This phenomenon primarily reflects a lack of uniformity, even a fragmented approach, in educational management thinking and development strategies, despite each locality offering justifications based on its specific socio-economic and educational characteristics. Perhaps the Ministry of Education and Training should issue more specific directives and regulations to unify this viewpoint?
Regarding the implementation of allowing candidates to register for more than one nguyện vọng (preference), changing preferences can lead to fluctuations in the admissions process, with certain immediate consequences. First and foremost, it creates psychological anxiety for candidates, their families, and society as a whole.
Some news outlets have used the word "chaos" to describe the reaction of parents and students upon receiving information about changes to their university application preferences in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, and Nghe An.
This psychological state will undoubtedly cause candidates to struggle to concentrate on studying and will significantly impact their performance in exams. Most importantly, it will lead to a weakening of students' and society's trust in the policies of the education sector.
It can also be seen that changes in the enrollment structure are not always a positive sign, specifically the shift from the center to the periphery and from the periphery to the center, as well as fluctuations in the quantity and quality of students at each specific educational institution.
This is most evident in the fluctuations in the number of applications and the cutoff scores of schools in localities that try to allow candidates to change their preferences. This can be clearly seen in Nghe An in recent years.
It's unusual, but not surprising, that while the cut-off scores at established, reputable, and strong universities have remained relatively stable or only slightly fluctuating in recent years, some universities have seen significantly higher cut-off scores since the introduction of the option to change preferences, sometimes by as much as 4 or 5 points. This is due to a shift in preferences from top-tier universities to lower-tier ones, from central locations to the outskirts, from cities to rural areas, and from the plains to mountainous regions.
Once the regulations allow it, choosing the safer option will obviously be the choice of the majority. However, in the author's observation, this very transition will gradually close the doors of public schools, even high schools, to students with weaker academic abilities, doors that, under the previous circumstances, remained wide open.
When students from cities flock to suburban areas, local students often struggle to compete. This is because, even with the same innate intelligence, children from city families are always given the best possible conditions to prepare for this increasingly fierce competition, inevitably putting those who are less fortunate at a disadvantage.
Interestingly, after studying for a while at "lower-ranked," "peripheral" schools, students can transfer to "top-ranked," "central" schools, leaving empty seats in classrooms that should have belonged to someone else, right in their local area. And the person who should have occupied that seat is pushed into a different school against their will.
The long-standing phenomenon of some students from suburban areas having to move to the city to attend private schools with tuition fees that are prohibitively expensive compared to their family income, or switching to vocational training despite their reluctance, is a significant issue that warrants serious consideration.
And given what has been said, in order to create fair competition in the choice of majors, perhaps it's time for more careful calculations.
