On the morning of June 11, more than 1.2 million candidates nationwide completed the first exam - Literature - in the 2026 high school graduation exam.
According to teachers' assessment, this year's exam questions continue to closely follow the structure announced by the Ministry of Education and Training, but still ensure differentiation, especially in the literary essay section.
Literature exam questions and suggested answers
Ms. Trinh Thu Tuyet - Literature teacher of Hocmai Education System - said that this year's exam questions closely follow the required standards of the 2018 General Education Program, both in the Reading Comprehension and Writing sections. The questions are designed according to the levels of consciousness from recognition, understanding to application, ensuring the assessment of students' abilities.
In the Reading Comprehension section, the first two questions mainly require recognizing information directly from text, so they do not cause much difficulty for candidates. The classification questions focus on questions 3, 4 and 5 when they require general thinking ability, understanding the symbolic meaning of language as well as relating to practical issues.
In particular, the question about the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to create "intelligence resonance" is considered to be topical and close to student life in the current digital transformation context.
For the Writing part, the social commentary question requires candidates to answer the question "How to have Vietnamese Steve Jobs?". According to Ms. Trinh Thu Tuyet, this is a topical issue, capable of arousing thinking, national pride and helping students propose solutions and orientations for the development of Vietnamese technology.
Meanwhile, the literary essay question requesting to analyze the poem "The Leaves" by poet Nguyen Dinh Thi is considered the most difficult part of the exam. Ms. Trinh Thu Tuyet said that the work is imbued with Nguyen Dinh Thi's thinking style, containing many layers of philosophical meaning about nature, life and human fate. Therefore, candidates not only need to appreciate the content but also discover and analyze the artistic uniqueness of lyrical poetry to highlight the ideological and humanistic values of the work.
The poem will be a difficult challenge for the contestant's ability to read, understand, receive, perceive and analyze" - Ms. Trinh Thu Tuyet said.
Sharing the same view, Ms. Nguyen Thi Quynh Anh - Literature teacher of Tuyensinh247 education system - said that this year's exam questions inherit the innovation spirit of the 2018 General Education Program when the questions are built according to the genre system.
This way of setting questions contributes to limiting the situation of rote learning, memorizing, and at the same time more accurately assessing students' reading comprehension, perception and analysis abilities.
According to Ms. Quynh Anh, the exam questions have quite clear differentiation, especially in the essay writing part. It is expected that the score distribution for Literature this year will range from 7.5 to 8.5 points, in which the score level that the most candidates achieve is about 7.5 - 8 points.
