VietNamNet Bridge - Teachers have suggested removing the essays on English tests for the high-school final exam.

On July 19 evening, the HCM City Law University announced the exam results of students in Ben Tre province. However, on July 20, the school made public a new transcript with the scores on English tests of 1,500 students, as the scores announced the day before were wrong.

The problem was that the HCM City National University, which marked English exams for the HCM City Law University, made technical errors in marking.

The English test comprised two parts – multiple-choice questions and essay. The maximum scores for multiple questions was 80/100, or 8 on a 10 scale. Meanwhile, 2 scores are the maximum for the essay.

However, since the software applied by the marker did not apply the conversion formula, the maximum score for the multiple-choice questions was 100 by default instead of 80.

Educators had their reasons when raising both multiple-choice questions and requeste on essay for English test. This assessed students’ capability in a more effective way.

Right after discovering the problem, the HCM City National University, the marker, had to fix the problem and show the corrected results. 

Prior to that, the Hue City University of Education on July 16 said that 11,600 exams out of 16,000 which had been marked by that day received zero for the essay.

In the 2015 high-school finals, foreign language was the exam subject which had the worst result.

Of 552,000 students who attended the English test at the 2015 high-school finals, 49,715 exam works got 3 scores only, while 49,358 got 2.5 scores.

Tran Dinh Ly from the HCM City University of Agriculture and Forestry said that educators had their reasons when raising both multiple-choice questions and requeste on essay for English test. This assessed students’ capability in a more effective way.

However, he still thinks that it would be better to remove the request about essays.

“The teachers, who mark exam works, believe that essays can only bring 20 percent of total scores. It takes them too much labor to follow the marking procedure,” he said.

Nguyen Quoc Chinh from the HCM City National University, said though writing is an important skill in English, it would be better to remove the essay.

“There should not be a test to assess the students’ writing skill in a high-school final exam,” he commented.

Meanwhile, Thai Doan Thanh from the HCM City Food Industry University, thinks that multiple-choice questions would be enough for high school finals, but essays would still be useful to choose better students for universities.


Tien Phong