Innovating enrollment according to the requirements of Resolution 71

tuyển sinh - Ảnh 1. — Parents and students learn about university admissions at the 2025 University and College Admissions Choice Festival organized by Tuoi Tre newspaper at Hanoi University of Science and Technology - Photo: HA QUAN

One of the contents of the tasks and solutions is the requirement to develop a project to innovate university admissions in the direction of correctly assessing learners' capacity, ensuring unified control of input standards of training majors and training institutions and strictly controlling output quality.

This is a strategic orientation that is both meaningful for sustainable development and immediately solves the shortcomings in the practice of developing highly qualified human resources, that is, enrollment does not really reflect the actual capacity of learners, is not linked to the training requirements of each specific profession, and the entrance standards for many majors do not ensure that students can study successfully at university level.

The confusion and inadequacies

The 2025 university entrance exam, the first year of the new general education program oriented towards capacity development, has revealed many problems and inadequacies.

Problems from score conversion, virtual filtering to inconsistency between admission methods show that the current admission system does not really meet the requirements of innovation.

These problems pose an urgent need: to seriously analyze the causes, identify which are technical factors, which are systemic problems, and which are the root causes.

Only on the basis of comprehensive and honest analysis can we build a feasible university admission reform project, in accordance with the spirit of Resolution 71 of the Politburo .

For many years, the management agency has allowed universities to apply many parallel admission methods: from high school graduation exams, transcripts to capacity assessment tests, thinking and international certificates.

All must be converted to the same scale for comparison. However, instead of issuing a general formula, the management agency gives each school the right to convert in its own way.

As a result, the same candidate, when applying to different schools, can be evaluated very differently: outstanding in one school but falling behind in another. Right from the beginning, the lack of uniformity has created instability, making the already complex data even more confusing.

Another paradox is that all admission methods are forced to convert to high school graduation exam scores - an exam mainly aimed at graduation, the difficulty of which changes every year, and has not reached a high level of standardization.

Meanwhile, international competency exams or certificates, which are designed to be standardized and have higher reliability, are "inferior".

This leads to a paradox: good candidates with real abilities in international standardized tests are sometimes evaluated lower than those who only have "good" academic records or high average scores.

When each school applies a different conversion formula, the national virtual filtering system must process input data asynchronously. As a result, many technical errors arise: a candidate was notified by a school that he or she had passed his or her first choice, but the general system showed the status as failed.

To overcome this, many schools have been forced to add additional criteria such as minimum scores for each subject or minimum scores for some combinations. However, these measures unintentionally disadvantage candidates, especially those who do not have the conditions to study outside the main curriculum.

Standardization conversion

The 2025 admissions cycle shows that if input data is not standardized, the entire system will be in chaos. The core reason lies in the use of non-standardized graduation exam scores as a measure for standardized exams.

This cause has been identified by the management agency and there has been a direction to build a standardized question bank to serve the next high school graduation exams and towards computer-based exams from 2027.

However, to be consistent with the above adjustment, it is necessary to research and implement in parallel the conversion of university admission scores according to the standardization of measurement and evaluation science.

Standardization is not a temporary solution but a prerequisite for fair and competent recruitment, creating high-quality human resources.

This is also the spirit of Resolution 71: building a capacity-based admission plan, properly assessing input capacity, not only assessing general capacity but also specialized capacity for each field of study.

Only when these abilities are properly assessed can admissions truly select suitable students and universities ensure training quality.

This is an inevitable step in the context of the country entering an era of deep integration, requiring a generation of elite citizens with the capacity to shoulder the aspiration for development and turn Vietnam into a developed and prosperous nation.

Justice in name only

The original goal of the conversion mechanism was to create fairness between admission methods. But when each school has its own formula, that fairness only exists in theory.

In reality, there have been many ironic cases: candidates with high graduation exam scores were ranked behind those with only outstanding academic records.

On the contrary, there are students who only rely on international certificates but are given excessive priority. Thus, many candidates suffer not because of lack of real ability, but only because of the "formula" of each school.

A mechanism that was intended to eliminate differences between admission methods inadvertently created new inequalities.

Immediate and long-term consequences

In the short term, the benchmark scores of many majors have increased dramatically, some even reaching the absolute threshold, causing heavy pressure on candidates.

Students in remote areas, who have difficulty accessing additional exams such as competency assessments or international certificates, are at a greater disadvantage. The constant change in admission criteria has left many students feeling insecure, anxious, and disoriented.

In the long run, the lack of standardization in conversion directly affects the quality of human resources. Students are selected without reflecting their true abilities, leading to imbalanced classes and difficulties in training lecturers.

As a result, society is at risk of facing a situation of "excess degrees, lack of skills": many graduates do not meet the requirements of the labor market.

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Sai Cong Hong

Source: https://tuoitre.vn/doi-moi-tuyen-sinh-theo-yeu-cau-nghi-quyet-71-20250913082857279.htm