LookAtVietnam – Thousands of students fail the university entrance exams every year. This is a big waste for the society.

More than 200,000 other students failed the exams for the universities at which they registered to study. The students had to apply to study at universities which required lower marks. However, only 65,000 seats were available for these students.

Analysts have pointed out that it is a big waste of manpower and material resources that several hundred thousand students fail the university entrance exams every year.

Setting oneself up to fail

According to the Ministry of Education and Training, 1.5 million students took the last university and junior college entrance exams, including 1.2 million students taking the university entrance exams and 300,000 taking junior college entrance exams. Meanwhile, only 250,000 students will be enrolled in universities. The overly big gap between the number of examinees and the number of students able to study at university reflects problems in career guidance, not to mention supply and demand.

The number of students who get marks below the floor marks always account for a large percentage. This means that there are a large number of students who do not have the necessary knowledge and ability to follow higher education, but they still try to take exams, even though they are in essence setting themselves up for failure.

Statistics released by the Ministry of Education and Training showed that a lot of students got zeros on exams, while several thousand examinees reportedly got less than five for three subjects.

500,000 students should not take exams

Educators say that some 500,000 fewer students should take university entrance exams every year. This would help universities reduce expenses and help society save a lot of resources.

Universities complain every year that they incur losses in student enrollment. Big sums of money are thrown into exam preparation works (police, security guards…). Examinees themselves also waste the time and money of their relatives, who escort examinees during exam days. Moreover, they have to pay the so-called ‘opportunity expenses’, which means that they waste time focusing on preparation for exams when they could be engaged in more productive labour.

Problems in perspective

Studying at universities is the dream of millions of students and their parents, even though their knowledge is far from meeting the requirements. And this is a problem in the perspective of Vietnamese students in particular and Vietnamese people in general.

Studying at university is the first and the only choice for the majority of students who finish high school, simply because studying at university is considered more ‘honourable’ than other paths of training. Failing exams to universities, to many people, means that the door to a good life has been closed.

Analysts and government agencies have rung the alarm bell over the imbalance in labour training structure, which has been existing for a long time in the national economy. Vietnam has many engineers, but lacks skilled workers. According to the General Department of Job Training, the structure of trained labourers in Vietnam is now as follows: 1 bachelor – 1.16 technical secondary school graduates and 0.95 vocational school graduates. Meanwhile, the standard ratio should be 1-4-10.

VietNamNet/VnMedia