VietNamNet Bridge – Varying instructions from the Ministry of Education and Training (MoET) on the use of multiple-choice exam questions for senior secondary school students has confused students and teachers across Viet Nam.

Students in Kon Tum Province’s Dak Ha Highschool prepare for the multiple choice exam.

Facing a barrage of queries, the ministry then issued a statement saying that multiple-choice questions would be allowed, but only if the question list was comprehensive.

Not too easy

Deputy Minister Nguyen Vinh Hien said the question kits must also not be easy for students to copy answers from each other.

However, he still emphasised that schools should not abuse multiple-choice exams and should limit them in the coming term-end exams.

“The ministry wants to prevent schools from abusing the multiple-choice form, because it it quite complicated to draft a question kit with comprehensive content for the whole study programme,” Hien said.

He said that once students had proper knowledge, they could have good results from either form of examination, adding that skills for multiple-choice exams were not complicated.

The source of the whole problem is the vague instruction that term-end exams for the academic year 2008 -2009 should still be in question and answer form (not multiple choice).

The instruction conflicts with earlier advice from the ministry asking senior high schools to apply multiple-choices in foreign languages, physics, biology and chemistry — as well as in high-school finals exams and entrance exams to universities. “It took teachers and students a long time to get used to multiple choice examinations,” said Phan Thu Ha, director of the Department of Education and Training of Dong Thap Province.

“And then the ministry suddenly required schools not to use them in term-end exams,” she said.

Nguyen Trai High School principal Kieu Trung Tien said the ministry needed to be more consistent.

“Students need time to adapt themselves to new study methods as well as examination forms, especially for high-school graduating exams,” he said.

He also said that multiple-choice exams had been used at his school for the last two years, thus students were confused when they heard the new instruction.

Meanwhile, Le Quan Tan, head of the Secondary Education Department of MoET, refused to comment apart from saying that the ministry’s opinion was that both multiple choice and question-and-answer forms in writing could both be applied.

(Source: Viet Nam News)