According to the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET), 237 universities and junior colleges in Vietnam, including 100 universities have completed their self-assessment. The ministry hopes that by 2015-2020, 90-95 percent of schools will complete the self-assessment process and transfer into a new period of having their schools assessed and accredited by exterior organizations.

MOET has decided that universities and junior colleges must be assessed and accredited, which is a part of the programme to build the “quality culture” of schools in Vietnam. looking at the high number of the schools which have finished the self-assessment process, one would feel optimistic. However, others are worried about the quality of the self-assessment, since it has been done too rapidly.

Self-assessment – what for?

According to Professor Nguyen Mau Banh, Member of the council for quality assessment, it takes foreign universities at least 18 months to assess themselves and fix the existing problems before they register to have their training service verified and accredited. Meanwhile, the universities in Vietnam only needed six months to do that .

What is more worrying is that the self-assessment reports simply show current problems in teaching. Schools did not draw up the plans to fix the problems.

According to Dr. Nguyen Kim Dung from the HCM City University of Education, many schools still do not have concrete plans to improve the quality of teaching. Most schools say they have curriculums, but thesecannot meet the requirements of the credit-based study.

Dung noted that after the self-assessment, the quality of teaching has not improved. Meanwhile, documents necessary for lecturers and students, such as he curriculums and teaching plans have not been made public on websites which would make it easier for learners to access information.

Experts say that conducting scientific research is one of the weakest points of Vietnamese universities. Dr Dung said the number of scientific projects has been decreasing.

Explaining these problems, some school headmasters said that after finishing the self-assessment, everything went back to the way it used to be, because schools lack management system and the plans to improve quality, and they also lack money to carry out improvement programmes.

“Quality culture” still far away

According to Dr. Ho Tan Sinh from the HCM City University for Information Technology and Foreign Languages, one of the biggest barriers to the school accreditation is that students, lecturers and school managers still have “vague” knowledge on the issue.

Therefore, Sinh said, it is very difficult to build the “quality culture” to serve as the reference for everyone to know about their duties and then ensure the teaching quality.

Dr. Dung said that in order to createthe quality culture, in the next stage after the self-assessment, MOET should request school managers to improve the teaching quality. The ministry should also set up a mechanism to encourage schools to get accreditation.

Source: Tien phong