Education ministry to prioritize IELTS, TOEFL exam approval

The Ministry of Education and Training said the decision is to resolve difficulties for those who wish to take these exams. It has requested relevant units to complete documents to get the ministry's approval to resume the tests.

Several foreign language proficiency exams conducted in Vietnam have been postponed in the past few months, including the IELTS conducted by the British Council and the IDP, which announced the postponement earlier this week. Exams for other foreign languages, like the HSK for Chinese or the Nat-test for Japanese, have been postponed since September.

The postponement of IELTS exams have caused trouble for students who began filing their admission documents to study abroad in the U.S. and Europe. Certain Vietnamese universities are also using the IELTS scores as a factor for admission and as a graduation benchmark.

Thousands of Vietnamese students would be affected by the postponement, Donna McGowan, director of the British Council in Vietnam, told national television channel VTV24.

The education ministry said the postponement was due to organizations failing to complete their approval documents, and the quality of those exams has not been managed properly. Deputy education minister Nguyen Huu Do said the approval process should take around 20 days if all documents are up to standard.