1.22 million candidates nationwide have completed the 2026 high school graduation exam. Currently, the grading work is being implemented. The Ministry of Education and Training said that this year is the first year that the Literature exam is graded according to the rubric, respecting candidates' feedback.
Ensuring reliability and "openness" in grading
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Tran Le Hoa Tranh, Faculty of Literature and Linguistics, University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University Ho Chi Minh City, said that the use of rubric in Literature exam marking is a step forward to ensure "openness", reliability and differentiation requirements.
Ms. Hoa Tranh said that the advantage of rubric is that it helps scores reflect more closely the actual quality of the essay. The way of describing the levels of the quality of this essay helps to limit the situation of evaluating only based on the number of ideas or compatibility with the answers. In particular, the differentiation ability of rubric creates conditions for excellent papers to be correctly identified.
In Literature, good students are not only people who write enough ideas, have few errors and present fluently; but also people who have the ability to detect problems, read and explore materials, express sharply, choose valuable evidence and create persuasiveness and inspiration with their own writing style. Rubric encourages quite good students to overcome stereotypical writing to show real ability, not to equate good writing with safe but lacking depth writing" - Assoc. Prof. Dr. Tran Le Hoa Tranh said.
Showing competency assessment
From the perspective of grading, teacher Duong Trung Thanh, a teacher at Bac Ninh Provincial Ethnic Minority Boarding School, believes that rubric helps scores be more fair. Specifically, a writing with only slogans cannot stand on par with a paper with analysis. A paper with enough ideas but blandness cannot stand on par with a paper with separate findings. A smooth essay but borrowing sample essays will not be able to cover up the lack of thinking. Conversely, a student with a new perspective, firm arguments, and a unique writing style will be worthily recognized, even if they do not follow the correct order in the answer key.
Taking a specific example in the social commentary question "How to have Vietnamese Steve Jobs?", teacher Thanh said that if grading according to the traditional opinion poll method, it is very easy to turn a problem with great suggestive power into an opinion poll: Individuals must be like this, schools must be like that, society must be like that. A paper with enough ideas has high scores, a paper without ideas has low scores.
According to Mr. Thanh, this scoring method is not wrong, but it has not touched the soul of the problem. Because the question about "Steve Jobs Vietnam" is actually a question about creative aspiration, about different bravery, about the ability to turn ideas into valuable products, and more deeply about an ecosystem with enough generosity for young people to try, to be wrong, to grow up.
Teacher Thanh analyzed that here, the rubric reveals a very clear advantage, not only judging whether students can propose solutions or not, but judging how students think about those solutions.
One student wrote that to have "Steve Jobs Vietnam", young people must be good at technology, proficient in foreign languages, and have digital skills. That idea is correct, but it is just the surface layer. A deeper article must see that Steve Jobs Vietnam is not only good at technology but must also be someone with aspirations and ambitions to contribute to the nation and humanity... Therefore, if students only turn "Steve Jobs Vietnam" into a "good technology engineer", the article will still be narrow" - teacher Thanh stated.
From the above analysis, this teacher recognizes that the rubric helps the grader recognize the depth: Which students only tell solutions, which students know how to analyze the nature of creativity, which students know how to see talent as the result of both individual qualities and the social environment.
This is the spirit of competency assessment: Not hunting for heads that know how to repeat, but discovering heads that know how to think" - teacher Thanh said.
