English optional in 2014 national grad exam: ministry

The English language will become an optional test in a national high school graduation exam in June, the Vietnamese Ministry of Education and Training (MoET) announced on Monday.

This is a big change because English has been a compulsory subject in the graduation exam for years.

MoET said at a news conference yesterday that 12^th graders will sit for four tests, instead of six in 2013, in their high school graduation exam this year, which is scheduled to take place from June 2 to 4.

They are required to do tests on math and literature and allowed to choose the other two from physics, chemistry, history, geography, biology, and a foreign language, the ministry elaborated.

Most Vietnamese students learn English as their foreign language but Japanese, Chinese, Russian, French, and German are also taught in local schools.

Every year 12^th graders must pass their high school graduation exam, whose tests are prepared by MoET, in early June before they can enroll in college via another more demanding exam one month later. 

Last year the graduation exam included six tests, with literature, math, and a foreign language being obligatory.

The MoET announcement followed weeks of debate over the ministry’s plan to rule English out of the graduation exam.

Last month the agency put forward a proposal for public discussion in which students would be required to do four tests in their graduation exam.

Literature and math would be compulsory while students would be permitted to choose the other two optional tests from physics, chemistry, history, geography, and biography.

English could be taken to gain extra grades in this exam, MoET said in that proposal.

But many educators then blasted the proposal, saying students would ignore English in that scenario whereas Vietnam is pushing for learning the language to help advance its international integration policy.

MoET once explained that it planned to exclude English because there is “a disparity in teaching and learning English in different regions across the country.”

The ministry was making a reference to a situation in which students in rural, mountainous, and poor areas do not have the right facilities to learn the language and thus find it truly hard to pass a test on English in the national exam, in complete contrast to their urban counterparts.

A MoET official told local media at the Monday conference that English will become compulsory again when this problem is solved.

Vietnamese twelfth graders now study math, literature, biology, physics, chemistry, history, geography, foreign languages, civics, national defense education, physical education, technology, and computing at school.