University and College Admissions: The "training furnace" era is over

Remember five years ago, up to this point, high schools have also had a common curriculum that creates conditions for their students to have time to focus on reviewing subjects for university and college entrance exams.

Many candidates in the provinces are also ready to prepare and wait until the graduation exam is over to go to the city and go to intensive exam preparation centers to study.

In those days, the furnaces were blazing like the areas around the University of Technology, the University of Education, the University of Social Sciences and Humanities... the classrooms were packed with people, the ceiling fans were spinning but could not cool down the heat of these furnaces.

But in the past 2-3 years, the training centers in Hanoi have cooled down a lot due to the Ministry of Education and Training's innovative way of creating exam questions for social essay subjects.

This year in particular, the furnace has almost gone out after the Ministry of Education and Training announced the sample test of the National High School Exam with the "2 in 1" criteria, which can be used for graduation and universities and colleges can also use it as a basis for university and college admissions.

Many admissions experts and high school teachers highly appreciate this method, saying that: Organizing the National High School Exam and creating exam questions like this is a great effort of the Education sector.

At H1 block, Hanoi Pedagogical University - one of the prestigious centers that attracts many candidates to prepare for the exam, has also announced the schedule and tuition fees for each subject for the new class starting in early April and ending in June.

Currently, this class has more than a dozen students registered, mainly independent candidates or those who intend to transfer to another school, or who have not passed the entrance exam this year and are registering to take the national high school exam to continue their university admission.

The number of people going to study for exam preparation is increasingly scarce, this is a reality that is happening not only in the training centers in Hanoi but also in many other provinces and cities. The university entrance exam is over, the time of cramming to take the exam with the advertisement of good teachers "100% pass the university" or "no win, pay" is over, but instead by accurately assessing the ability of the learner through the results of the high school exam to consider admission to universities and colleges, then the fact that there are no more students at the training centers is just a matter of time.

Towards competency assessment

The pioneer of this advanced and superior entrance exam method is Hanoi National University with the content of the exam to assess the candidates' abilities. Accordingly, in the 2015 entrance exam, Hanoi National University agreed to use a comprehensive exam to assess the general abilities to evaluate candidates participating in the university entrance exam for all training majors. The exam will be held in 2 sessions in May and late July 2015.

To help candidates get familiar with the format of the test, VNU-Hanoi has also published a sample general competency assessment test in the form of a free trial on the VNU-Hanoi website. A trial test was also organized by VNU-Hanoi for students of Dai Tu High School, a mountainous district of Thai Nguyen province.

If anyone has looked at the mock exam of Hanoi National University, they will see that the exam is designed with a high level of comprehensive knowledge. The exam is compiled from questions from the standardized exam question bank based on the structure of the exam matrix announced by Hanoi National University.

Knowledge covers the basic areas of Mathematics, Literature, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences. To do the test, candidates are not required to have a very advanced understanding, but they do need to have a broad knowledge that is completely within the high school curriculum taught in school.

Of course, the test questions aim to assess the cognitive and thinking abilities of the learner, so they require the candidate to have understanding, not just memorization.

It is worth mentioning that when taking this test, candidates will do each part in turn according to the time limit for each part and click the “Finish” button when finished, and will not be allowed to do that part again. Immediately after completing all three parts, candidates will see their test results displayed on the results page.

The knowledge is wide-ranging, the questions are not too difficult, to do the test, candidates not only need enough knowledge but also need to think well. This is the comment of students of Dai Tu High School after participating in the mock test held at the school.

Assessing learners' capacity and qualities is the way of advanced education systems. This is also one of the key tasks of Resolution No. 29-NQ/TW8 on fundamental and comprehensive innovation in education and training. Innovation in teaching and learning towards developing learners' qualities and capacities is being implemented by the whole sector.

After Hanoi National University, there will certainly continue to be schools that will exercise autonomy in admissions through their own assessment. But the general trend is that there will certainly no longer be the rote assessment of student capacity as before.