Beautiful English Score: Why is it Unstable and Worrying?

Unstable?

Dr. Hoang Ngoc Vinh, former Director of the Department of Vocational Education, Ministry of Education and Training, commented that the English score distribution of the 2025 high school graduation exam looks balanced on the surface, but contains many instabilities, with an average score of only 5.38, a median of 5.25, and nearly 50% of candidates below average.

Meanwhile, Physics scored an average of 6.99, with only 9.8% of candidates scoring below 5 points; Chemistry also scored 6.06, significantly lower than English.

This poses a paradox: candidates who choose English are at a distinct disadvantage when applying to university, simply because of the lower difficulty and score distribution. Choosing different subjects with the same learning ability can lead to a difference of up to 1-1.5 points, which is unfair in a competitive admissions environment.

Dr. Hoang Ngoc Vinh, former Director of Vocational Education Department

According to Mr. Vinh, we cannot praise the "beautiful" score distribution if we cannot answer: what is the percentage of candidates in which region have test scores below average?

If the majority of students are from disadvantaged areas - the Northwest, Central Highlands, and Southwest, then clearly the specific score distribution in disadvantaged regions or provinces will increase inequality.

"Perhaps it is too early to praise this year's graduation exam score distribution when data by region, school type, and target group are not yet clear. Any praise about "standardized exam questions" or "reasonable distribution" lacks a fair assessment basis," said Mr. Vinh.

Mr. Vinh said that a national exam not only needs to differentiate, but also needs to ensure fairness between regions, groups of candidates and between subject choices. Without a mechanism to standardize scores or innovate assessment methods, the disadvantage due to subject choice will continue and continuing to increase the professionalism of the test-making team is an urgent task.

Why is the beautiful score spectrum so… worrying?

Mr. Le Hoang Phong, Academic Director of YOUREORG Education & Training Consulting Organization, said that this year's English score range is good, but he feels... worried.

Mr. Phong analyzed that, from a technical perspective, the English score distribution in 2025 is a clear step forward. Instead of continuing the rightward trend as in previous years, this year's score distribution has achieved a standard bell shape, the average score of 5.38 is almost identical to the median of 5.25, and the standard deviation is only 1.45.

In terms of testing, Mr. Phong said that this is an ideal score spectrum with no extreme "skewed tail", no collapse due to too many 10s, and no bottom drop due to tricky questions. There were only 2 exams with a score of 0 and only 141 students with a score of 10 out of more than 351,000 exams - equivalent to 0.04%, a record low in many years.

"In other words, the 2025 exam is tightly designed, with good control of differentiation, especially in the high-score group," Mr. Phong emphasized.

However, from the perspective of education, especially educational equity, Mr. Phong believes that such perfect standardization raises a big question mark.

As the score spectrum is compressed sharply around the mean and the standard deviation narrows to 1.45, the development space for students at both ends of the ability spectrum, especially those who study the correct and complete curriculum, has been alarmingly shortened.

Compared to 2024 - a year with a slightly right-skewed score spectrum but still stratified, this year's high score space is clearly "shortened".

Although in 2025 the total number of candidates taking the English exam will decrease sharply (only about 39% compared to 2024), because English becomes an optional subject in the high school graduation exam, the fluctuations in the score distribution still reveal many noteworthy signals about the test design and differentiation philosophy.

The average score decreased slightly from 5.51 to 5.38, indicating a moderate increase in the difficulty level of the test. However, this change is not large enough to cause controversy, if only looking at the general level.

The standard deviation dropped sharply, from 1.88 to 1.45, showing that the score spectrum has been "compressed" towards the average. This phenomenon clearly reflects one thing: the exam has tightly controlled the differentiation in depth, while at the same time limiting the ability of good and excellent students to make breakthroughs.

The percentage of students scoring 7 points or more decreased from 25.2% to 15.1%, a decrease of nearly 40% in absolute terms, although the total number of exams also decreased. If converted, in 2024, there will be about 228,450 students scoring 7 points or more; in 2025, this number will be only 53,114 students - equivalent to a decrease of more than 175,000 good and excellent candidates, an alarming decrease in the ability to classify students at the top.

The number of students achieving a perfect score (10 points) decreased from 565 to 141, a decrease of 75%, but if calculated as a percentage of the total number of candidates, in 2024 it was 0.062%, and in 2025 it was 0.04% - an extremely small level, showing that the exam has almost "locked" the door to a perfect score.

Meanwhile, the percentage of students below average only decreased slightly, from 42.7% to 38.2%, meaning that more than 134,000 candidates in 2025 still did not achieve average scores, nearly half of the total number of exams. This shows that the 2025 exam has not really supported the group of weak students to make significant progress, even though the score distribution has been adjusted in a technical direction.

In this year’s exam, a paradox worth pondering emerged: many students who reached level B1, meaning they had studied correctly, studied enough and met the output standards of the general education program, could not achieve the high scores expected. Not because they were not capable enough, but because the exam questions had quietly shifted to level B2, even reaching the C1 threshold, with a dense concentration of academic vocabulary, journalistic writing style, and language structures beyond the main curriculum.

Even students with a solid foundation in textbooks, if not exposed to an academic test format like IELTS, can still easily "break" at the end of the test. These questions not only require language skills beyond B1 standard, but also require analytical skills, information comparison... things that the general education program does not provide systematically and universally.

As a result, the group of students who are serious about following the output standards do not have enough space to demonstrate their true abilities, and are even held back from the opportunity to break through.

The essence of a national exam such as the high school graduation exam is not to select excellent students based on criteria outside the curriculum, but to ensure that all students, whether from the city center or remote areas, have the opportunity to demonstrate their true abilities.

Clearly, the 2025 English score spectrum is a nice, balanced graph, well-controlled for skewness and extremes. But educational equity does not come in the form of a score spectrum.

“I think the essence of a national exam is not to select excellent students based on criteria outside the curriculum. A good exam is not because it produces a "beautiful" score range, but because it opens up development space for the entire spectrum of learners," said Mr. Phong.

“It is worth mentioning that this is a high school graduation exam - meaning it is a test for completing high school, not necessarily a university entrance exam for one or several schools. If students study the correct curriculum, have a solid grasp of basic knowledge but still cannot achieve a good score, then the fault lies not with them but with the way the system is designing the test beyond the capacity area taught,” said Mr. Phong.