Concerns about when the admission regulations will change a lot
The Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) has issued the 2025 enrollment regulations with many new points. Notably, eliminating early admission and applying equivalent conversion of scores between admission methods in the same major or training program is a highlight. This rule must be published at the same time as the threshold to ensure input quality, helping candidates have enough information to choose their wishes.
In particular, candidates do not need to choose the admission method code or combination. The general admission system of the Ministry of Education and Training will automatically consider admission according to the method with the highest results of candidates, helping to reduce the burden and increase the chance of admission.
Nguyen Thai Duong, a 12th grade student at Hanoi - Amsterdam High School for the Gifted, currently has an IELTS certificate of 7.0 and a thinking assessment test score of 73.64. In previous years, with this result, I could qualify for temporary admission before the high school graduation exam. However, due to many changes in this year's admission regulations, Thai Duong had to adjust its exam review strategy, focusing on the 2025 high school graduation exam.
At this stage, I think I should not worry too much about things that cannot be changed, but should focus on reviewing to achieve the highest results in the upcoming exams - Duong shared.
Ms. Nguyen Thu Phuong (Hoang Mai District, Hanoi) - a parent with a child in grade 12 - said that the new regulation seems to make parents and students more confused. She and her child researched admission information from many schools, but each school has many admission methods, each method has a different way of calculating scores.
"Previously, it was only necessary to compare the benchmark scores of last year with the test scores to predict the admission rate. This year, I cannot be sure if my child's results are safe or not" - Ms. Phuong shared.
Converting admission scores to ensure fairness
Regarding this issue, Deputy Minister of Education and Training Hoang Minh Son emphasized that the main goal of the conversion is to assess candidates' abilities fairly between admission methods. If the different capacity assessment methods are too large and cannot be converted, they should not be used for admission to the same major.
The Deputy Minister said that there are many methods of converting points, including two main methods: decentralization and linear recess.
With the classification method, from the data source of candidates participating in many different admission methods ( high school graduation exam, transcript, competency assessment, thinking assessment), on that basis, determine the top 1%, top 5%, top 10% scores in each exam to conduct conversion.
"For example, if the top 1% of the Hanoi National University competency assessment exam achieves 130 points and the top 1% of the high school graduation exam achieves 27 points, these two scores can be considered equivalent" - the deputy minister analyzed.
The linear recess method is to divide the score gap, finding correlations between the scores of each admission method.
For example: If the group of candidates has 25-30 high school graduation exam scores corresponding to 100-130 competency assessment scores (of Hanoi National University), they can use a linear recess model to find a conversion formula.
The conversion formula is y = ax + b, in which x is the test score of one method, y is the conversion point to another method.
"There are many other methods, but in general, universities can completely implement this conversion scientifically" - the vice president affirmed.
In addition to guiding the conversion of scores based on entrance exam results, the Ministry of Education and Training also proposes a more scientific approach: Re-verify the conversion of scores based on students' learning results.
Schools can evaluate the learning results of first- and second-year students to check whether the groups of students admitted using different methods have a correlation in their abilities or not.
If an admission method has a lower standard score but students have better academic results, or vice versa, a higher standard score but students study less, this may indicate the unreasonableness of the conversion method. Based on this data, schools can adjust the conversion rate of scores to better suit the reality.
