At a meeting on August 21 which Deputy Prime Minister Vu Duc Dam convened with the Ministry of Education and Training and related agencies to review this year university admission process, Education Minister Pham Vu Luan took the responsibility for the disadvantages in the process which caused trouble for students and parents.
Reporting the first phase of the national university admission process, Education Minister Luan said that the improper process caused trouble amongst students and parents who must wait in queuing a long line in universities. Especially, the situation is more troublesome for students and parents in provinces and cities that are different from locations of universities.
Many parents had to stop working for days to accompany their children to big cities to withdraw their papers and then apply to other schools.
Unlike previous years when students had to take two separate exams to graduate from high school and enter the university or college, this year, the ministry has applied a number of changes in the process by merging the two exams into one.
Students have used the results of the exam, which is called the national high school exit examination, for appling to universities and colleges.
This year’s national high school exam took place in July, attended by hundreds of thousands of students from across the country.
At the end of the month, each student received four copies of a certificate of the exam results for four choices respectively.
According to Education Minister Luan, the ministry did not predicted the troubles this year. In addition, bad information technology and lacking stratification amongst schools by quality made the situation worse. On behalf of the ministry, Mr. Luan said that he took responsibility for the matter.
The ministry pledged in the next phase, candidates just apply by filling form in the website and send the document to their senior high school or departments of education and training. The document will be sent to universities which will soon announce entrance scores.
According to the Ministry's report of the first phase of university admission, as of August 20, approximately 570,000 students applied into universities and 43,000 of them withdrew their application to apply to another school, accounting for 8.1 percent of total students applying for the first phase.
Meantime nearly 10,000 other students came to local departments of Education and Training to make adjustment of their choice.
Deputy Prime Minister Vu Duc Dam said that the university admission process this year had not been carried out well causing concerns and trouble for students and their parents; therefore, Mr. Dam asked the Ministry to learn the lesson and listen to experts, students and parents' ideas to have better measures.
The public has criticized the Ministry did not well prepared for the process and the methodology was unscientific while information technology was bad.
