Fees increase, but competency assessment exams are still increasingly 'popular'

Although exam fees have continuously increased over the years, reaching up to 600,000 VND/exam, university competency assessment exams are still increasingly "attractive", continuously setting new records in the number of participating candidates.

On the morning of February 23, Hanoi National University began to open the registration portal for the competency assessment exam but the network quickly became congested. The monitoring system recorded that from 9:00 a.m. - the time the registration portal opened - to 10:47 a.m. on February 23, there were always over 250,000 users accessing the homepage https://hsa.edu.vn and 121,055 candidate accounts logging in to select exam sessions. The large number of candidates logging in and querying led to congestion, with candidates having to wait about 30 - 60 minutes to choose their exam location and session.

Although the registration period was scheduled to last 6 days, from February 23 to 28, with 6 exam sessions and a capacity of 90,000 seats, by 11:50 a.m. the same day, after less than 3 hours, the Hanoi National University's Competency Assessment Examination Council had received nearly 89,200 exams, reaching 99.8% of the exam capacity. Accordingly, most exam sessions and locations were full.

Previously, on February 21, Ho Chi Minh City National University also announced that nearly 130,500 candidates registered to participate in the first round of the 2025 competency assessment exam of this unit, an increase of about 34,400 students compared to last year and the highest number in the exam rounds so far.

The record number of candidates registering for the exam is also recorded by Hanoi University of Science and Technology for the first round of the 2025 thinking assessment exam. Specifically, in the first round this year, the exam received registrations from nearly 14,000 candidates, nearly 5 times higher than the number of more than 2,800 candidates registering for the first round of the 2024 exam. This number also exceeds the total of more than 10,200 candidates of all three rounds of the 2023 competency assessment exam combined by nearly 4,000.

Along with the increase in the number of candidates, the exam fees for the competency assessment exams are also constantly increasing. The exam fee for the competency assessment exam of Hanoi National University in 2022 is 300,000 VND/exam. In 2023, Hanoi National University said that the fee for 2022 is the subsidized level to support candidates affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and increased the exam fee to 500,000 VND. In 2025, the exam fee for Hanoi National University will continue to increase to 600,000 VND/exam.

Hanoi University of Science and Technology also increased the thinking assessment exam fee from 300,000 VND/time in 2023 to 500,000 VND/time from 2024 to present.

Along with the fee increase, this year, universities also officially released handbooks to support candidates' review after many years of affirming that they would not release review materials.

The number of candidates taking the exam is large, with hundreds of thousands of students, but according to statistics from the Ministry of Education and Training, out of more than 550,000 candidates who are admitted and confirmed to study each year, only about 2-3% are admitted based on the scores of the competency assessment exams, equivalent to about more than 1,000 candidates.