TPO - The Ministry of Education and Training has released a system of sample exam questions for the 2025 high school graduation exam for students studying under the new curriculum. According to many teachers and experts, this year's exam questions are quite unusual and "shocking".
According to Mr. Nguyen Thanh Cong, M.Sc., from the High School for Gifted Students affiliated with the University of Education, the general feedback from teachers and students for most exam subjects is that they are "difficult," and achieving high scores is not as easy as in previous years.
Regarding Biology specifically, Mr. Cong believes that, in terms of breadth of knowledge, it covers all three years of high school (grades 10, 11, and 12); there are questions that overlap with the knowledge content of both years; knowledge from grade 12 still dominates with a proportion of over 80%; knowledge from grades 10 and 11 accounts for a smaller proportion.
Because the exam is structured according to the new curriculum with a focus on developing competencies, it strongly assesses the candidates' abilities. Many questions incorporate practical elements, events, and situations that occur in laboratories, research units, or in nature and human production activities.
"However, in my subjective opinion, the questions should focus on real, practical problems that have occurred and are occurring in the present and in the future, requiring candidates to propose solutions or choose solutions to address the problems. The focus should be on avoiding the idea of simply inventing practical scenarios," Mr. Cong stated.
For the first time, the Biology exam reduced the "calculation element" to a minimum, focusing on the fundamentals of Biology. However, this did not diminish the difficulty of the exam. The difficulty was evident in the true/false questions and the fill-in-the-blank questions, which tested a deep understanding of the subject matter, logical thinking, and calculation skills; but the intricate calculations were significantly reduced.
With the exam's objective being to assess graduation and university admission, the increasing difficulty of the exam raises several issues.
Teacher Cong believes that graduation exam scores will decrease, eliminating the phenomenon of a flood of perfect scores; however, combining graduation exam scores and academic transcript scores for graduation assessment will help maintain the graduation rate and not affect it.
With lower test scores, the peak of the score distribution will no longer approach 10 or 30; there will be a significant gap between the peak and the maximum score. This helps to better differentiate candidates for admission to various training institutions, avoiding the situation where a score of 29 points still results in failing to get into university.
"With a higher level of differentiation, universities will maintain or revert to using high school graduation exam scores for admissions due to their greater accuracy, while admissions based on academic transcripts or a combination of both will decline. The government may issue guidelines for universities to use high school graduation exam scores for admissions, creating fairness among different regions and groups of candidates," Professor Cong predicted.
Associate Professor Dr. Nguyen Van Khanh, a senior lecturer at Hanoi Pedagogical University, a member of the 2018 high school curriculum development committee, and also the chief editor of the Physics curriculum for the 2018 high school graduation exam sample questions, believes that from 2025 onwards, in order to better assess students' abilities and reduce the probability of guesswork in exam questions, the high school graduation exam will undergo changes in its format.
According to a decision by the Ministry of Education and Training last March, except for foreign languages, the structure of the exam papers for subjects using the objective multiple-choice format consists of three parts. Part I includes familiar multiple-choice questions; Part II includes true/false questions (yes/no items); and Part III consists of short-answer questions.
"The sample exam for the 2025 high school graduation exam, published by the Ministry of Education and Training on October 18th, already has this structure and format," Mr. Khanh emphasized.
Regarding the assessment that the sample physics exam is "good" and "unusual," Mr. Dao Tuan Dat, a lecturer in general physics at Hanoi University of Science and Technology and academic advisor at Anhxtanh High School (Dong Da, Hanoi), believes that one of the reasons for this assessment is likely because the recently published sample exams have a familiar multiple-choice question format, with the addition of true/false and short-answer questions.
Furthermore, due to years of focusing on practicing calculation-based questions, the recently published sample papers have reduced the number of questions requiring complex calculations, giving us the feeling that the exam seems "interesting" and "unusual".
"The sample exam papers recently published by the Ministry of Education and Training are those that have undergone testing and evaluation on a number of students. After analyzing the score distribution after the testing, these papers have been adjusted to have a suitable difficulty level for the high school graduation exam in accordance with the requirements of the 2018 General Education Curriculum," Mr. Dat said.
Source: https://tienphong.vn/de-tham-khao-tot-nghiep-thpt-2025-co-that-la-hay-la-khien-nhieu-nguoi-choang-post1684894.tpo
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