Difficult to understand how to calculate benchmark scores under new regulations
From 2025, the Ministry of Education and Training stipulates that all admission methods must be converted to the same scale, to ensure fairness between candidates taking high school graduation exams, competency assessment exams, academic records or international certificates. Accordingly, the Ministry builds a framework for converting floor scores and university benchmark scores between methods using the percentile method, through many steps. The responsibility of universities organizing their own exams is to determine the graduation exam subject combinations that are suitable for the characteristics of the specific exam organized by their school and recommend other schools to use them, clarifying which combination is most suitable.
Schools must also announce the percentile of the results of their own exams in 2025 (X0, X1 in the table), coordinate with the Ministry to analyze the graduation exam results of candidates who have taken their own exams, then announce the score ranges of the appropriate subject groups (A0, A1, B0, B1... in the table). This must be done no later than three days after the graduation exam results are available.
Based on this data, the admission scores and the entrance threshold of each major will be converted linearly within each score range. The problem is that each high school graduation exam, the capacity assessment (ĐGNL), the thinking assessment (ĐGTD)... have different scoring scales. The high school graduation exam is calculated on a 30-point scale, the ĐGNL exam of Ho Chi Minh City National University is calculated on a 1,200-point scale. The ĐGTD exam of Hanoi University of Science and Technology is calculated on a 100-point scale.
"We wonder if this complicated calculation method of the Ministry of Education and Training can ensure fair conversion of the results of these exams so that candidates are not disadvantaged, when their children have invested all this time in each separate exam and the upcoming high school graduation exam," Ms. Nguyen Lan Anh, a parent of a student at Le Quy Don High School - Dong Da (Hanoi), wondered.
A student expressed his disappointment: "I was born in 2007, I just finished the HSA exam, batch 505. I studied until 2-3 am to get 100 points for the HSA exam, now I feel a bit meaningless. Many students taking the HSA, APT... are feeling extremely confused, especially when with the same HSA score, last year they easily passed the top majors of universities, this year it was converted to a lower high school score and... could fail. I feel like the rules were changed at the last minute, completely negating my studying efforts and exam selection strategies."
How to understand the new standard score conversion correctly?
On May 22, Hanoi University of Science and Technology became the earliest unit to announce the conversion plan for benchmark scores between admission methods in 2025. Based on the general guidance of the Ministry of Education and Training, Hanoi University of Science and Technology applied the percentile method to find equivalent benchmark scores between the three admission methods of the University, including: Talent Selection (XTTN) method, admission method based on DGTD exam scores and admission method based on high school graduation exam scores. In addition, Hanoi University of Science and Technology conducted statistics and analyzed admission data of the past 3 years, different admission combinations, analyzed the XTTN score distribution by areas, TSA test score distribution, high school graduation exam score distribution with the original combination of A00 (Math - Physics - Chemistry) to serve as a basis for determining the relative percentile range. On that basis, the expert team has built a correlation table between university admission methods of Hanoi University of Science and Technology to widely announce to candidates.
In other words, percentile is the ranking in percentage of all candidates taking the exam. That is, rank all candidates from low to high according to their scores, then calculate what percentage you are in the top. For example, if you are in the top 5% of the high school exam (meaning your score is higher than 95% of the candidates) and your 850 points of the GPA are also in the top 5% of the GPA, then you can consider that 850 points of the GPA is equivalent to 27.5 points of the high school exam (if 27.5 points is the high school score in the top 5%).
The Ministry of Education and Training collects the score spectrum (scores and the number of candidates achieving that score) from exams, applies the percentile analysis method to determine the correlation between the scores and publishes the standard conversion table for universities to use consistently, avoiding each school converting according to its own criteria as in previous years.
Source: https://phunuvietnam.vn/quy-doi-diem-chuan-thi-sinh-va-phu-huynh-roi-boi-20250528114554144.htm
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