The national Microsoft Office Specialist World Championship (MOSWC) 2015, the sixth of its kind in Vietnam, was kicked off in diverse competition sites across Vietnam on April 18-19 by the Organising Board, consisted of the Ministry of Education and Training, IIG Vietnam- a leading testing and educational quality accreditation organisation, military-run telecom group Viettel and Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper.

This year competition drew hundreds of thousands of contestants from junior colleges, universities and secondary schools nationwide, with 1,500 contestants selected, representing 260 school teams to attend the national qualification round, according to a recent statement released by the Organising Board.

Accordingly, the MOSWC this year will for the first reach out to all the 63 municipalities countrywide.

The Hanoi secondary education team this year has 15 elite members carefully selected through three city-level qualification rounds from a host of 700 students coming from 124 primary and secondary schools in the city.

“We believe that MOSWC will not only robustly nurture office computing learning among school and college students but also give them access to the ever evolving information technology of the world.

“The competition will also help the participating schools to get familiar with international standard training programmes and make sure that graduated students can meet the requirements of the current tough labour market in a time of global integration and find a good job for themselves,” said Vice Minister of Education and Training Nguyen Vinh Hien.  

According to Doan Hong Nam, IIG Vietnam president and head of the MOSWC 2015 Organising Board, in addition to the participation of universities, junior colleges and vocational schools as in previous years, MOSWC 2015 will for the first time witness the engagement of 12 provincial Education and Training departments.

“This is a major breakthrough in this competition, as it is proof of the strong support from local governments to MOSWC in the expectation of taking an international competition as a launch-pad for higher computer science studying and learning quality in schools,” Nam asserted.

At the MOSWC 2015 national qualification round, competitors will take the Microsoft Office Specialist (MOS) test, the one designed to evaluate users’ skills with various Microsoft Office applications, including Word 2010, Excel 2010 and PowerPoint 2010.

Fifty top contestants from every component of the test will secure a berth in the national finals on May 24 to take on the MOS Expert and Scenario tests (or MOS Specialist and Scenario tests for MS PowerPoint).

The three National Top Prize winners for the three components of the test will become Vietnam’s MOS 2015 ambassadors representing Vietnam to compete in the World Championship Finals held in Dallas, Texas, the US in August this year.

MOSWC is the largest office computing contest in the world, held annually all over the globe by US-based Certiport Corporation, a world leading provider of computer science certificates.

To date, the competition has been in existence for 14 years globally and has entered its sixth year in Vietnam.

Over the last five years, Vietnam has increasingly shown what it can do among international friends by winning high positions in the world finals in three consecutive years: Gold medal for Microsoft Word 2010 at MOWC 2012, MOSWC 2013 Bronze medal for Microsoft Word 2010, two Bronze medals for Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint 2010 at MOSWC 2014.

VIR