Expanding the scope of private exams
In 2025, many large universities will continue to organize competency and thinking assessment exams with many rounds to serve university admissions.
For example, at the University of Technology, in 2025, the thinking assessment exam is expected to be held in 3 rounds on weekends, each round will have 3-4 testing teams at 30 testing locations.
In addition to the previous testing sites, Hanoi University of Science and Technology will open a new testing site to support students in the Northwestern provinces (test site in Lao Cai province). Accordingly, the exam can accommodate about 75,000 test takers.
Candidates can also take the competency assessment exam organized by Hanoi National University of Education. Last year, this exam attracted a large number of candidates, up to more than 11,500 students.
2025 will be the first year that Hanoi Pedagogical University 2 will organize its own entrance exam and use the results of its own exam for university admission. The school also announced that it will not use the results of aptitude tests organized by other universities.
Similarly, military schools and academies will organize their own computer-based competency assessment exams from 2025. The exam will include comprehensive knowledge of Math, Literature, English, and a combination of Natural Sciences and Social Sciences. Candidates will use the exam results to apply to military schools and academies with a quota of about 30% of the total enrollment quota.
In addition, police schools and academies also organize specialized competency assessment exams and use the results of these exams for admission consideration.
Innovate exam questions, strengthen supervision
This year's Hanoi National University's competency assessment test has many new points related to: New test structure (science or foreign language section); Number of questions and how to ask questions in each topic; Questions related to practical situations, works outside the textbook; Cluster questions appearing in all test sections; Candidates can choose the third test section.
In addition, Hanoi National University also adjusted the schedule for candidates registering for the exam for the first time to reduce network congestion like last year.
According to Prof. Dr. Nguyen Tien Thao - Director of the Testing Center (Hanoi National University), the sample exam structure for assessing capacity in 2025 includes 50 questions on mathematics and data processing, and 50 questions on literature and language. These are two mandatory parts of the HSA exam.
The third part allows candidates to choose between Science or English. The time limit for the third part is 60 minutes. Candidates choose 3 out of 5 topics: physics, chemistry, biology, history, geography; each topic has 17 questions (including 1 test question) to complete the science part.
The questions in the competency assessment test are about 75% objective multiple choice questions with 4 options and 25% fill-in-the-blank questions.
If last year, cluster questions only appeared in the language test, from 2025, the competency assessment test will add cluster questions in all test sections and topics. Cluster questions include general questions and specific questions to develop and assess candidates' competencies from low to high levels.
Cluster questions will exploit rich data sources, assess students' thinking in each field and across fields. These are changes in building a question bank for competency assessment exams.
Candidates should also note that the questions in the exam will not be arranged from easy to difficult but will be randomly shuffled according to a fixed matrix.
At Hanoi University of Science and Technology, many modern testing technologies are applied to the exam such as technology to build standardized thinking test questions, bridge theory in the exam, technology to grade the exam according to the multi-parameter IRT model, automatic check-in technology according to CCCD cards integrated with the personal data management system on the National Population Database to identify candidates coming to take the exam to completely prevent proxy exams and cheating in exams...
