Circular 16 stipulates the conditions, order and procedures for opening training majors and suspending training activities at doctoral, master's and university levels.
There are too many master's and doctoral degrees now, but the quality is uneven, including the "incubator" doctorates that have been reported by the press. Society often no longer has faith in these degrees, causing well-educated people to not want to mention their doctoral degrees, even if they are real doctors.
Recently, the case of Vuong Tan Viet's "super-fast" doctorate at Hanoi Law University, or the "plagiarized" doctorate at Hue University of Science, has caused further public outrage. Therefore, tightening the training of masters and doctors is necessary.
Circular 16 stipulates the conditions for opening a doctoral training program, requiring at least 1 or 2 associate professors and 3 doctors in the appropriate field as full-time lecturers.
The regulation that there must be enough lecturers with academic titles and degrees to open a doctoral training program is necessary, but more important is scientific integrity in doctoral training and management of records and input qualifications of graduate students.
A typical example is the case of Vuong Tan Viet, who used a fake degree but was still able to study to get a bachelor's and doctorate degree "at super speed". To be frank, the people who guided and criticized Vuong Tan Viet's doctoral thesis were also people with academic titles and degrees, but whether they were honest or not is clear.
Or like the "plagiarized" doctoral thesis at Hue University of Sciences, the supervisors and reviewers were also lecturers with academic titles and degrees, but still let the mistakes go. Later, when there was a complaint and the press reported, they checked and concluded that there was "plagiarism".
Furthermore, many doctoral theses, like "badminton", are also guided and reviewed by professors who have academic titles and degrees, but after defending those theses, they are just put in a drawer because they do not contribute anything to science or serve society.
Therefore, the scientific integrity, courage, and ethics of the instructor and reviewer are really important. If there is still a negative situation while ignoring quality, then the regulations on lecturer conditions will only be a formality and a mechanism.
