Vice President proposes ditching high school grad exam

A top leader in the Vietnamese government has suggested scrapping the national high school graduation exam as it is unnecessary, she says, to continue giving such easy tests.The Ministry of Education and Training (MoET) should consider abandoning the exam since students have passed it without much difficulty over the past years, Nguyen Thi Doan, State Vice President, said during a conference in Hanoi on Wednesday.About one million twelfth graders in Vietnam annually have to take three compulsory tests on a foreign language – usually English, math, and literature together with three other papers in the exam in early June to achieve a high school diploma.Official figures show that almost all of the 2013 candidates (97.52 percent) made it through while a very small percentage failed the tests in the previous years.“Why should we go on with the organization of such an exam when the pass rates are that high?” Doan wondered.She argued that the exam is an onerous burden for candidates since those who want to go to college are required to take challenging admission tests in early July.“An exam right before a tougher one can bring candidates nothing but an unnecessarily heavy workload,” the leader said.Unlike many countries which select students for higher education based mainly on the applicants’ high school academic performance, Vietnam recruits college students via papers on a set of three subjects chosen from math, physics, chemistry, literature, history, geography, biology, and foreign languages, depending on each specific major.Assoc Prof Van Nhu Cuong, president of a private high school in Hanoi, concurred with Doan, saying that it is absurd to judge 12 years of studies with a few graduation tests in several hours.Local educators have long called for the abolition of the exam, presenting similar arguments, and insisted that very few countries ask their students to take such tests now.Tuoitrenews