Accordingly, the content of the national high school graduation exam from 2025 will have a number of important changes, such as the addition of some new question types (True-False questions, short-answered questions). That will increase the ability to assess the academic capacity of students. Also, the content of the graduation test for each subject will promote comprehensive intelligence and integration.
This is to adapt to the new 2018 general education curriculum, whose first batch of 12th graders will sit their high school graduation exam in 2025.
In addition, formerly, all stages of question development for every test must be confidential and done by a group of selected academics. Now this process is a joint effort of all related people in the educational industry. In particular, high-quality questions that have been successfully piloted by different localities will be included in the national question bank. Then in compliance with a standard procedure of the Education and Training Ministry, a new test for one specific year will be compiled to ensure confidentiality.
The public are now concerned about next year’s 12th graders, who have experienced nine years under the old curriculum and only 3 years under the new one yet with different textbook sets, which might lead to certain difficulties.
However, Deputy Head Nguyen Ngoc Ha of the Education Quality Management Agency assured that the Education and Training Ministry has already considered this matter so that there are not many sudden changes in the graduation exam next year, providing better conditions for learners to review their obtained knowledge.
This Ministry is encouraging tertiary educational institutes use the result of the national high school graduation exam as one of their admission methods since this new version will better differentiate test takers who are in the score segment of 5 and above.
Particularly, the differentiation depends on the two factors. As to the technical aspect, the newly added question types of True-False and short answer are able to decrease probability, and hence only outstanding students with a strong academic foundation can have maximum score. The preliminary piloting test result on 10,000 students is able to confirm that.
Secondly, the questions are developed with the aim of assessing students’ abilities in implementing theoretical knowledge to solve practical problems, not tricky mechanical questions. This also means a strong and comprehensive academic basis helps test takers to achieve higher scores.
