After more than 10 years of implementing the “2-in-1” exam, a devidion on separating or combining the high school graduation exam and university admissions has once again been raised following debates about exam questions and score pressure, and negative incidents related to the exam.
The proposal to separate the high school graduation exam and university admissions, recently put forward by Nguyen Dac Vinh, chair of the National Assembly’s Committee for Culture and Education, has received much discussion, especially in the context of the abnormal situation involving 147 perfect 10 scores in Mathematics at Tuyen Quang High School for the Gifted, where 19 people have been prosecuted.
Since 2015, the high school graduation exam has maintained the “2-in1” model, serving both to evaluate learning outcomes at the high school level and as an important basis for many universities to conduct admissions.
However, many education experts argue that requiring a single exam to fulfill both purposes creates conflicts, starting with the exam design itself.
Bui Hoai Thang, Head of the Training Department at HCMC University of Technology, believed that the goal of the high school graduation exam is to assess the completion level of the general education curriculum.
Forcing the graduation exam questions to have high differentiation to serve university admissions is “pedagogically forced.”
“Forcing an exam that is inherently universal to carry the additional role of selecting high-quality human resources for the university level will distort the nature of both exams, wasting social resources and creating unnecessary pressure on learners,” Thang assessed.
Do Van Dung, former president of the HCMC University of Technology and Education, also recognized that after more than 10 years, the “two-in-one” exam has exposed certain limitations.
“A single exam can hardly simultaneously meet two requirements: graduation consideration for the majority and classification of candidates for highly competitive universities,” he said.
Meanwhile, universities have also gradually diversified admission methods with competency and thinking assessment tests, transcripts, interviews, or portfolios, instead of relying only on high-school graduation exam scores.
However, Dung also argued that resuming the two separate exams as before is not an appropriate solution. This could increase social costs, add exam pressure, but not necessarily solve current shortcomings.
If the two exams are separated, the burden of organization, costs, and geographical disadvantages will return. More importantly, separation also does not address the roots of cram schools or inequality in education, because these problems stem from uneven quality of general education and the psychology of considering the exam as the determinant of future.
Tran Manh Ha, Head of Training Office, Banking Academy, supports continuing to maintain the current exam. According to Ha, this is still a standardized test, both serving graduation recognition and as a reference for university admissions, while significantly saving social resources.
“If the Ministry of Education and Training organizes another admission exam, its nature would not differ from the current exam. Meanwhile, candidates still have to take two exams, both graduation and university. And if schools organize themselves, it will return to many separate exams as before, both difficult to control and much more expensive,” Ha said.
Ha also argued that competency assessment, thinking assessment tests like HSA or TSA have only reached a portion of candidates. For example, the HSA exam in 2026 had more than 100,000 participants, while the country has more than 1.1 million candidates taking the high-school graduation exam each year. Using these tests as the main admission method is still not feasible, especially for students in remote areas.
Teacher Vu Khac Ngoc, one of the first to detect violations in the 2018 national high-school exam in Ha Giang, also thinks that separating the two exams will cost more time, effort, and expense but may not eliminate negative impacts.
He stressed that the greatest value of the current high school graduation exam lies not only in graduation approval or admissions, but also in a national-scale dataset to evaluate educational quality.
“The score distribution is like a test result in medicine. From that data, localities and schools can see the comparative correlation of teaching and learning outcomes of their own locality with other localities, their own school with other schools, and this subject with other subjects, thereby adjusting teaching and learning activities for the better,” Ngoc said.
He said that people should not take the fact that ‘every year over 95 percent pass graduation’ to question why the exam is held. Because even if a production line has 95 percent of products meeting standards, no one discards the output product inspection stage.
Thuy Nga – Thanh Hung – Le Huyen
