VietNamNet Bridge - During the recent National Assembly question & answer session with Minister of Education and Training Phung Xuan Nha yesterday, a deputy quoted a story that made all deputies laugh. 

The deputy said that during an exam, an excellent student was assigned to solve the questions and then gave the results to other students. If this student had a cough, it meant the correct answer was No. 1 and so on. Deputies also raised a lot of questions about the new form of test exams.

Previously, in an interview with VietNamNet in September on the change of the form of examinations in Vietnam, a guest from the Hanoi National University boasted that his school has a big bank of questions to serve the new form of test examinations.

The "question bank"

There is something unusual, according to this guest, when questions are “standardized” without “trial test” to ensure the core criteria of the quality of questions. That way of working is very subjective. The process to "standardize" questions as described by the guest has been very common in Vietnam for a very long time.

The so-called "standardization process" is totally subjective as the questions are compiled by the authors only and if they are not tested, nobody can ensure the quality of these questions. That’s why all questions must be used in trial tests before they are added to the bank of questions.

With such a process of making the bank of questions, it is impossible that the tests given to students have the same level of difficulty. Meanwhile, one student can enter university when his mark is only half of a point higher than others. Thus, it is unfair.

At any school in Vietnam today one will hear the same thing: our school has already had tens of thousands of questions in our question bank but the quality of these questions is still a big question mark.

I think after three years of implementation of test examinations without research of the quality of the question bank, we can confirm that the quality of questions is good.

It is known that UCLES of the UK has nearly 200 years of experience in educational evaluation, ETS of the US has nearly 70 years of experience but they still conduct trial tests of questions (for all subjects) when they develop the bank of questions. They send their questions to many countries, including Vietnam, to ask for comments in order to avoid cultural bias.

Everyone knows that the higher number of questions, the more benefit for students. If one is weak at this content, he will have another chance in other content. Moreover, the more questions, the wider scope they cover. A test exam of foreign languages with 40 questions is too short and such a test is unsuitable to choose students for schools specializing in foreign language training.

So how many questions are enough for such a test? Let’s ask the teachers because in education, democracy must be respected.

The concept of "ability" needs to be redefined

The phrase "Competency Assessment" has recently become very common in Vietnam but I do not know how many people who speak these words really understand the inner meaning of this phrase.

If we have "competency assessment" tests, it means that we also have tests for not “assessing competency"?

I considered and made a comparison between the English test for “competency assessment” of the Hanoi National University and an English test for the high-school test of the Ministry of Education and Training. With my limited knowledge, I failed to find out the difference between the two tests in terms of the "competency" that needs to be assessed.

I think the concept “competency” or “ability” in this case should be defined and explained clearly to educators, teachers and students because it is good for the teaching and learning process.

With the inadequacies of combining two purposes in an exam, I suggest to separate into two tests: one for the students who only want to graduate from high school and those who want to enter college. This test should be assigned to the provincial departments of Education and Training. 

Nguyen Phuong