Changing the structure of the Ho Chi Minh City National University's competency assessment exam from 2025

The information was shared by Dr. Nguyen Quoc Chinh, Director of the Center for Testing and Training Quality Assessment, at the conference on the general competency assessment exam for the period 2018-2023, with a vision to 2025.

2025 is the year when the first batch of students studying the 2018 General Education Program will take the high school graduation exam. According to Mr. Chinh, the exam will continue to be implemented in the form of objective multiple-choice tests on paper, organized simultaneously in many localities to facilitate the participation of candidates.

The exam still consists of 3 parts: Language use; Mathematics, logical thinking and data analysis; Problem solving. However, the structure of the exam has been adjusted, mainly in the problem solving part. In addition to knowledge of Physics, Chemistry, Biology, History, Geography, this part will add a group of knowledge about Economic and Legal Education. This is a new subject, according to the 2018 general education program.

Also in this part of the exam, candidates can choose 3 out of 6 groups of problems instead of having to do all of them as is currently the case.

In recent years, the structure of the Ho Chi Minh City National University's competency assessment exam includes 120 multiple-choice questions, 150-minute test time, 1,200-point scale with three parts: Language use; Mathematics, Logical thinking and Data analysis; Problem solving.

The Language Use section consists of 20 Vietnamese and 20 English questions, with a maximum score of 400. The questions and reading passages assess literary knowledge, vocabulary usage, reading comprehension, and analysis of Vietnamese and English writing.

The Mathematics, Logical Thinking and Data Analysis section has a maximum score of 300, including 10 general mathematics questions; 10 logical thinking questions in the form of inference and determination of logical rules; 10 data analysis questions with a given data table.

The Problem Solving section consists of questions related to natural and social science knowledge, with a maximum of 500 points. Each of the fields Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Geography, and History has 10 questions.

Mr. Chinh said that since September, the team of experts from Ho Chi Minh City National University has started to build a question bank matrix and sample exam papers according to the new orientation. At the end of this year, this unit will organize workshops and collect opinions from relevant parties to complete the exam structure and question bank matrix.

The sample exam questions for Ho Chi Minh City National University's capacity assessment from 2025 will be announced early next year.

The Ho Chi Minh City National University Competency Assessment Test was first held in 2018 to recruit students for member schools. After 6 years, the scale of the exam has increased. From 5,000 candidates from 616 high schools in 2018, by 2023, this number is more than 100,000 candidates from 1,815 schools. The exam results are used by 97 universities and colleges for enrollment.

The whole country currently has about 10 exams to assess capacity and thinking, the largest of which are the exams of Ho Chi Minh City National University and Hanoi National University.