Resolution No. 71-NQ/TW of the Politburo on breakthroughs in education and training development has clearly outlined tasks and solutions to modernize and elevate higher education, creating a breakthrough in the development of high-quality human resources and talents with very specific guiding orientations.
One of the contents of the tasks and solutions is the requirement to develop a project to reform university admissions in the direction of accurately assessing learners’ capabilities, ensuring unified control of input standards for training disciplines and institutions, and strictly controlling output quality.
This is a strategic orientation that not only has sustainable development significance but also immediately addresses shortcomings in the practical development of high-quality human resources, namely that admissions do not truly reflect the actual capabilities of learners, are not linked to the training requirements of specific professions, and many fields still have input standards that do not ensure students can successfully study at the university level.
Chaos and Shortcomings
The 2025 university admissions period, the first year associated with the new general education program oriented towards capacity development, has revealed much chaos and inadequacy.
Problems from score conversion, virtual filtering to the lack of uniformity among admission methods show that the current admissions system does not truly meet the requirements of innovation.
This chaos poses an urgent requirement: to seriously analyze the causes, identify what are technical factors, what are systemic issues, and what are the root causes.
Only on the basis of comprehensive and honest analysis can we develop a feasible project to reform university admissions, in the true spirit of Resolution 71 of the Politburo.
For many years, management agencies have allowed universities to apply multiple parallel admission methods: from high school graduation exam scores, academic transcripts to capacity assessment exams, thinking tests and international certificates.
All must be converted to the same scoring scale for comparison. However, instead of issuing a common formula, the management agency delegated the right to each school to convert in their own way.
The consequence is that the same candidate, when applying to different schools, can be evaluated very differently: outstanding in one school but ranked lower in another. Right from the input stage, the lack of synchronization has created instability, making already complex data even more tangled.
Another paradox is that all admission methods are forced to be converted to high school graduation exam scores – an exam mainly aimed at graduation consideration, with difficulty changing each year, not yet achieving high standardization.
Meanwhile, capacity exams or international certificates that are designed to be standardized and have higher reliability are “marginalized”.
This leads to a paradoxical situation: excellent candidates with real ability in standardized international exams are sometimes rated lower than those who only have “beautiful” academic transcripts or high average scores.
When each school applies different conversion formulas, the national virtual filtering system has to process unsynchronized input data. The consequence is many technical errors: some candidates are notified by one school of admission in their first choice but the general system shows a failed status.
To fix this, many schools are forced to add secondary criteria such as subject benchmarks or minimum score requirements for some combinations. However, these measures unintentionally disadvantage candidates, especially those without conditions to study outside the official curriculum.
Standardizing Conversion
The 2025 admissions period shows that if input data is not standard, the entire system will be chaotic. The root cause lies in using non-standardized graduation exam scores as a measure for standardized exams.
This cause has been identified by the management agency and there is an orientation to build a standardized question bank to serve subsequent high school graduation exams and move towards computer-based testing from 2027.
However, to synchronize with the above adjustment, research and implementation of university admission score conversion should be carried out in parallel according to the standardization of measurement and assessment science.
Standardizing conversion is not a temporary solution but a prerequisite condition for fair admissions, accurate capability assessment, and formation of high-quality human resources.
This is also the spirit of Resolution 71: building a capacity-based admissions project, accurately assessing input capabilities not only general capabilities but also specialized capabilities according to each field of study.
Only when these capabilities are accurately assessed can admissions truly select suitable learners, and universities ensure training quality.
