VietNamNet Bridge – The Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) plans to set up two floor mark systems this year with an aim to increase the number of students eligible for enrolling in universities.

Analysts have commented that the ministry makes such a decision to please the non-state owned universities which have been complaining that they cannot enroll students because of the current unreasonable mechanism of setting floor marks.

The floor marks are the minimum marks set for every group of exams students must have from the national university entrance exams to be eligible for applying to any school in Vietnam.

The current regulation has been keeping a lot of students away from both state owned and non-state schools. This has never been a problem to state owned schools, but has made non-state schools miserable, because non-state schools are less favorable in Vietnam.

MOET plans to set up 2 floor mark systems. The upper floor mark system would be defined in the way it has been following over the last many years. The lower floor mark system would be calculated by the gross of the 3 average marks of 3 exam subject (there are 3 exam subjects for every exam group).

As for the students whose marks lying between the upper and the lower floor marks, schools would consider the students’ high school learning records to decide whether to enroll them.

The temporary solution not applauded

The decision is believed to help non-state owned schools ease their thirst for students and revive the ones on the brink of bankruptcy. However, many educators have casted a glacial look at the decision.

“The solution suggested by MOET on the two floor mark systems is just a temporary method to rescue non-state owned schools, while it will not help settle the current problems to the every root,” said Dr Do Van Dung, Vice President of the HCM City University of Technical Education.

“MOET might have been put under the pressure which forces it to think of the solutions to help the schools survive,” Dung said.

Dr. Bui Tran Phuong, President of the Hoa Sen University, agrees that this is just a temporary solution, which may help rescue non-state schools now, but should not be seen as a long term solution.

Phuong said MOET seems to be a little bit late when releasing the decision at this moment, when the national university entrance exams would come in just 4 months.

“Stability and consistency need to be highlighted as the most important factors for a national exam. Therefore, it would be better not to set up new regulations so suddenly,” he commented.

Violently criticizing the decision, a lecturer of the HCM City Law University, has warned that MOET would face the strong protest from the society, because it, on one hand, emphasizes the need of improving the higher education quality, but on the other hand, lowers the floor marks, i.e. lowering the requirements on input students.

Dung said the lowering of the requirements on input students would make it more difficult to produce graduates with high qualifications. It is estimated that 200-400 students of his school have to stop learning every year because they cannot catch up with the learning process, and most of them had low marks from the university entrance exams.

NLD