University Admissions Orientation 2018: Need to Continue Innovation

Speaking at the Conference, Principal Pham Quang Minh agreed with the data and summary opinions that clearly reflected the positive and negative points of the 2017 university admissions. To overcome the remaining limitations, the Principal said that each unit in the University must innovate in thinking and work, pay more attention to students, contribute to promoting the image of the University more widely, and create conditions for recruiting high-quality candidates.

The conference also agreed on the basic points in the university and graduate admission work in 2018. Accordingly, the School will continue to focus on promoting the image of "pre-admission", continue to provide admission information, promote the image of the School through channels that are considered effective in 2017 such as: website, fanpage, student ambassadors, appearing in the book "University Admissions 2018 - Things to know" (Education Publishing House)... In addition, faculties/departments need to create their own admission promotion products such as writing articles on career orientation, creating infographics introducing majors,... The School will plan to directly admit students from specialized high schools and establish close cooperative relationships with a number of key high schools to attract excellent students.

In addition, the School and faculties need to consider enrolling students according to suitable majors, choosing priority points, and changing enrollment targets accordingly based on enrollment practices of previous years.

Regarding postgraduate admissions, Faculties/Departments need to have a plan to prepare conditions for admissions, specifically announcing plans to open supplementary knowledge classes, reviewing groups of subjects in related and suitable majors, and at the same time notifying the Training Department to coordinate information for candidates who have a need to study. At the same time, increase human resources for the admissions department, especially for the admissions promotion stage.

Basically, the admission method in 2018 is considered to need to be significantly innovated in the "pre-admission" stage from February 2018 to May 2018. This is the time when candidates need to learn most clearly about universities to make their choice. Therefore, during this time, the School will focus on communicating and widely promoting its image to high school students across the provinces. According to Associate Professor, Dr. Hoang Anh Tuan (Vice Principal of the School), taking advantage of resources from websites and online fanpages is very necessary and needs to be further promoted and developed in the coming time because these are information channels that many people can easily access.

Some opinions at the Conference also said that the School could completely organize its own Open Day (a day for high school students who want to learn about universities), in parallel with participating in the Admissions Consulting Day organized by Tuoi Tre newspaper at Hanoi University of Science and Technology as usual.

In addition, in order to have orientation for developing and implementing a plan to promote and advise on regular university admissions in 2018 and the following years, the Admissions Department of the Training Department conducted a survey on the level of access to information sources about the University of Social Sciences and Humanities and the reasons for choosing the University of Social Sciences and Humanities of students of the QH-2017-X course. The survey results showed that most candidates learned about the University of Social Sciences and Humanities through the website of the University of Social Sciences and Humanities (60.9%) or other online information access channels such as the Facebook page (27.9%), website and other information search channels (29.7%).

A survey of information channels that high school students often use to find admission information also shows the advantage of online tools when Facebook and electronic pages account for 69.8%, and the school website accounts for 56.8% of the survey results.

In the survey on the reasons for choosing the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, it was shown that the training quality and the brand of the University are extremely important criteria, having great appeal to learners (47.8%). The survey also showed that high school students today have a high level of independence in choosing their majors, with 51.2% choosing their majors based on their personal interests.

This is all useful reference information for orienting the promotion and consulting work for regular university admissions in the coming years. The school leaders and the Admissions Council will rely on the available updated data, and at the same time consult the comments from the departments to give specific directions for the upcoming 2018 admissions season.