Equality based on exam data

The real issue after the controversy surrounding the question "How to create Vietnamese Steve Jobs" in the 2026 high school graduation exam's literature section is not whether students in remote areas know Steve Jobs, but whether a standardized exam truly creates equal opportunities for students from vastly different backgrounds.

Equality in education cannot be understood simply as all candidates receiving the same exam. What needs to be achieved is substantive equality, meaning that students from different backgrounds still have a reasonable opportunity to demonstrate their abilities.

From a public policy perspective, the current high school graduation exam serves two functions simultaneously: to assess learning outcomes, determine graduation eligibility, evaluate teaching quality, and provide data for use by higher education and vocational education institutions in student admissions.

The combination of multiple objectives into a single exam creates tension. Graduation exams test the minimum standard that all high school students need to meet. University entrance exams, on the other hand, are ranking mechanisms that need to differentiate candidates, especially those with high scores. When an exam serves as both a threshold and a funnel, it must be both comprehensive enough to avoid unfairly eliminating average students, yet sharp enough to select outstanding individuals. The conflict of equality begins there.

The 2026 Literature exam is a clear example. The Ministry of Education and Training explained that the question about "Steve Jobs of Vietnam" was designed to take regional differences into account, was a differentiating question, and did not require candidates to have in-depth knowledge of the figure. This argument is somewhat reasonable. The question presented Steve Jobs along with other technology figures in the prompt, so candidates could understand this as a metaphor for a creator, an innovator, someone capable of creating great value for society. The question also only accounted for a portion of the exam score.

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But being able to answer the question and having the opportunity to do well on it are two different things. A student in a large city, frequently exposed to the internet, technology media, skill-building books, and discussions about entrepreneurship, will read the phrase "Steve Jobs Vietnam" with many layers of meaning. A student with less access to those spaces might still understand the question in its general sense, but will have to pay an additional cognitive cost to decode the symbolism. In the exam room, that cost is not invisible. It can become the difference in scores.

This is the most noteworthy mechanism of inequality. Simply by selecting an urban, global symbol and placing it at the level of the question used for differentiation, the advantage can shift towards the group of students with the appropriate cultural background. The bias doesn't lie at the entrance, as many students can still write it. It lies at the high-scoring level, where the question rewards fluency in the language of the technological and innovative world .

A topic outside of the textbook can still be considered fair if it is sufficiently self-contained. This means that students who are unfamiliar with the character, event, or symbol mentioned still have enough information in the question to understand the issue and formulate an argument. Conversely, a question that requires students to have prior reading, internet, or experiential knowledge to write in depth, write well, or write differently, no longer tests the skills honed in school. It begins to award points for the social background of each student.

Therefore, the question arises: before using non-textbook material in national exams, how did the exam-setting body assess its bias in terms of approach? Were the answers truly open-ended? Did the grading rubric ensure that students were not disadvantaged simply for not delving deeply into the character's biography?

Therefore, a fair assessment step should be added to the question-setting process. The question review board should include teachers from rural schools, schools in disadvantaged areas, etc. They should be asked to evaluate the cost of decoding the text for students outside urban centers. For differentiating questions, the rubric should clearly state that candidates may agree with, develop, or refute the prompt if the reasoning is sound. After the exam, the Ministry should publish the score distribution by province, region, and school type, along with a separate analysis of the differentiating questions.

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A fair education is not about making every exam easy and familiar, nor is it about eliminating differentiation, but rather differentiating based on thinking ability, not on the life experience that society has unevenly distributed before students enter the examination room.

Source: https://thanhnien.vn/binh-dang-tu-du-lieu-de-thi-185260613162029984.htm