VietNamNet Bridge - At the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences (VASS), one teacher guides up to 44 PhD students and one PhD is produced every 1.76 days.

MOET’s inspectors have found many problems in enrollment, training management and degree granting at VASS.

In 2015 and 2016, the academy produced 2,811 master’s degree graduates, but did not report this to MOET.

The academy was discovered as reporting the wrong number of permanent lecturers, which determines the number of students it is allowed to train. The number of associate professors in reality was 10 lower than reported. In January 2017, there were 21 professors, 174 associate professors and 258 PhDs.

The lecturing staff at that moment included seven associate professors and 17 PhDs (3 associate professors and six PhDs for the third group of training majors; four associate professors and 11 PhDs for the seventh group of training majors).

Under the current regulations, with the number of professors and PhDs, the academy could enroll 86 postgraduates for master’s training in 2017, including 33 postgraduates in third-group and 53 in seventh-group majors, while it was not allowed to train masters in first-group majors and to train doctors in all groups. 

However, the academy decided that it would enroll 1,600 postgraduates for master’s training in 2017.

MOET affirmed that the academy has no capability to enroll students for doctoral training in all majors and for master training in group 1 (education).

The inspectors also found that the number of master’s and PhD students in 2015 that every VASS lecturer guided was higher than allowed.

At one moment, one lecturer was assigned to lead 44 students, including 29 students in law, 10 in public policy, and five in social work. Every other lecturer had to lead 18, 11, 10 or nine students.

In addition, the academy still trained masters on local campuses, including HCMC, Da Nang and Dak Lak.

Some PhDs in economics were assigned to guide the PhD students in education management, while the PhDs in anthropology had to lead students in ethnography.

1,114 students successfully defended their master’s theses in 2015. The figure was 1,697 in 2016.

In fact, this information about VASS was discovered by the local press a long time ago, which raised doubts about the quality of training at the academy. 

Meanwhile, the topics of many PhD holder’s theses were not up to academic standard and in some cases, were described as ‘nonsensical’.

The doctoral thesis named ‘The commune chair’s characteristics in communication with people’, is one of the topics. However, VASS said that every topic has its own meaning.

Nguyen Xuan Thang, president of VASS, said doctoral theses “do not have to be sublime, but they should approach real matters in life”.

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