Ministry of Education and Training plans to remove minimum graduation exam scores for medical and pedagogical majors

According to the draft university admission regulations for 2025, the Ministry of Education and Training plans to apply a minimum score (the level of eligibility to apply for admission) for the health and medical groups. Candidates must have academic results in all three years of high school from good or above, or a graduation score of 8 or above.

Some majors have lower minimum requirements - good academic records or graduation scores from 6.5, such as physical education, music education, art education, college-level preschool education, and majors such as nursing, preventive medicine, midwifery, dental prosthetics, medical testing, medical imaging, and rehabilitation.

The above floor score will be applied to both the transcript and graduation exam score methods. Previously, the Ministry set separate floor scores for these two groups, calculated based on a combination of three subjects.

"But that floor level does not closely follow the quality requirements and is very difficult to calculate every year," Mr. Nguyen Manh Hung, chief specialist of the Department of Higher Education, explained at a meeting with southern universities in the middle of the week. Mr. Hung did not give more details.

"To ensure correlation, we decided to remove the high school graduation exam score threshold and only use the criteria of academic results and graduation scores," he added.

The ministry also plans to change the graduation exam scores to increase the proportion of learning outcomes in grades 10, 11 and 12 to 50%, with the remainder being graduation exam scores. In previous years, the transcript score only accounted for 30% and only used the results of grade 12.

Since 2018, the Ministry of Education and Training has set a threshold to ensure input quality for the pedagogical and health sectors. This regulation comes from the reality of enrollment in 2017, many pedagogical schools set low benchmark scores, some even set only three points per subject. For the Health sector, the ministry sets a floor score to improve input quality.

In the past two years, the minimum score from the graduation exam results for the Pedagogy major was 18-19 for a combination of three subjects, including priority points. For 11 majors in the health group, the minimum score was 19-22.5, the highest in the medical and dental majors.

In fact, for top schools such as Hanoi Pedagogical University, Ho Chi Minh City Pedagogical University, Hanoi Medical University, Ho Chi Minh City University of Medicine and Pharmacy, the minimum threshold for many majors is not too meaningful because the admission score is always 5-6 points higher or more.