VietNamNet Bridge – A series of new policies have been laid down by the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET), while the high school finals come in just three months.

A lot of innovations would be applied for the 2014 high school finals. Students would have four exam subjects instead of six. The exam results, plus the high school learning records would determine if students can graduate from high school. Meanwhile, in the past, this was 100 percent determined by the exam results.

MOET has decided that foreign languages would be an optional exam subject, though it initially designed it as an auxiliary exam subject. The students good at foreign languages, might take the exams to get bonus marks.

One hundred percent of students will have to attend the final exams was the last-minute MOET’s decision. Prior to that, it planned to exempt 20 percent of high school students from attending the finals.

However, no one can say for sure if this would be the final decision of MOET. The ministry once “okayed” some exam organization plans, but has suddenly asked for re-discussion. Will there be 2-day, 2.5-day, 3-day or 4-day exams?

Most recently, MOET has announced that an exam council would be set up at every high school. The students from different schools can go to the same exam councils in some special cases, but they would be put in different exam rooms.

Especially, the ministry has unexpectedly cut down the exam time. The time for linguistics & literature, for example, has been cut down from 150 minutes to 120 minutes.

Explaining the decision, an official of MOET said: “No need to ask students to write too much on exam papers. You just need to read one paragraph to know if someone is good at literature.”

The same decision has also been made for math. No once has come forward and explained the reason. However, a similar reason could be cited that the students’ ability could be assessed just through some math questions.

Commenting about the innovations, Professor Van Nhu Cuong, Headmaster of the Luong The Vinh High School, said MOET seems to strive to carry out the exam reform which aims to “ease the pressure on students and the society, and make finals less costly.”

It is clear that the state budget would have to pay less money for the finals if the finals would last two days instead of three days as previously. Meanwhile, students now have only four exam subjects instead of six and they can choose exam subjects for the finals, which would allow easing the burden on their shoulders.

However, Cuong has expressed his worry that the innovations would not allow to exactly assess the students’ ability.

In the past, history was a compulsory exam subject. However, from now on, it would be just an optional subject. Observers believe that very few students would register to attend history exam because this is a very difficult subject.

And if history is no longer an exam subject, students would not spend their time on history, which would lead to the big holes in their social knowledge necessary for their future lives.

VNE