Recommendation to review the teaching and testing of elective subjects

The Association of Universities and Colleges has just sent a petition to Minister of Education and Training Nguyen Kim Son on the implementation of the 2018 general education program, the organization of high school graduation exams and university admissions from 2025, in which it requested to review the organization of teaching and exams for elective subjects.

Many subject combinations at high school level are not suitable.

The document states that, in principle, students can register to choose elective subjects according to their abilities, strengths and career orientation, but in reality, the right to arrange these subject combinations belongs to each school, depending on the situation of teachers and facilities.

The Association of Universities and Colleges recommends that the Ministry of Education and Training review the organization of teaching and testing for elective subjects.

Requiring students to determine their chosen subjects from the beginning of high school and making it difficult to adjust them during the learning process means forcing students to confirm their specialized direction early.

On the other hand, students have not received adequate career counseling at the secondary level to choose subjects at the high school level, and then decide which university to enroll in (while universities have not yet announced their enrollment plans), this is a very unreasonable demand.

Many of the subject combinations chosen by high schools may not be suitable for students’ abilities, strengths and career orientations. This leads to a decrease in the input human resources for natural sciences and the consequence is that the quality of basic sciences and STEM sciences will decrease in quantity and have a long-term impact on the quality of the system in the future.

According to the Association, the immediate consequence is that high school science teachers, especially biology and chemistry teachers, who do not have teaching hours, have to perform other duties.

There may also be cases where there are subject combinations with an overload (for example, physics - chemistry - biology) so that very few students register to study. This will not meet the country's human resource development needs in the coming period (for example, STEM human resources need to account for 35%).

Therefore, this Association recommends that the Ministry of Education and Training urgently evaluate the entire program at all three levels, discover serious shortcomings that need to be adjusted immediately. In the immediate future, request the Department of Education and Training to direct high schools to review the list of subject combinations to choose from so that students have more opportunities to register for many university entrance exam combinations.

Allow students to change their chosen subjects according to their needs to serve the admission process for university majors that are suitable to their abilities and strengths that have been formed during their high school studies. At the same time, direct high schools not to arbitrarily arrange combinations of chosen subjects that are contrary to the regulations of the Ministry of Education and Training; build combinations of chosen subjects based on surveys of opinions of first-grade students, and arrange chosen subjects according to students' needs.

Need to increase time for optional exams

Regarding the 2025 high school graduation exam, the Association believes that the number of subjects and the students' prior knowledge of the subjects are exactly the same as the high school exam more than 40 years ago. However, the 2025 4-subject exam has a new special feature with 36 ways to choose subjects, instead of 4 combinations as before.

According to the Association, the design of the exam plan, in which all optional subjects are tested in 50 minutes, will make it difficult to accurately assess the ability of the learner, especially the design of 40% of the questions with true or false options, which increases the ability of the candidates to guess. This leads to the value and classification of the exam questions being not good.

This association recommends that the Ministry of Education and Training issue different types of exam questions in compliance with the 2018 General Education Program, the continuing education program at high school level, and groups of students who study elective subjects and those who do not study elective subjects, to suit the candidates taking the exam.

Increase the time for taking the optional subject exams and find solutions to limit the possibility of "guessing" in the form of true or false questions (accounting for up to 40% of the score of each subject) to fully assess the learners' abilities, ensuring the value and classification of the exam, so that universities can easily select candidates based on high school graduation exam results.

"Allow candidates to choose additional elective subjects (even if they do not study elective subjects in the school's prescribed curriculum) to ensure that learners fully develop their self-study capacity and have more opportunities to be admitted to universities while ensuring input quality," the petition stated.

Computer-based test multiple times a year

Also according to the proposal, in the following years, the exam regulations will be to assess capacity; mainly on provincial computers; the exam questions will be drawn from the question bank provided by independent testing centers assigned by the Ministry of Education and Training. Localities will proactively organize the exam multiple times a year according to the time regulations of the Ministry of Education and Training.

While still maintaining the paper-based exam format, the Ministry of Education and Training only organizes high school graduation exams according to the 4 traditional groups A, B, C, D as before.

Source: https://thanhnien.vn/kien-nghi-xem-lai-cach-day-va-thi-mon-lua-chon-185241204150924723.htm