The Ministry of Education and Training is committed to increasing the quality of education by improving assessments of students’ knowledge and learning capacity, Deputy Minister Nguyen Vinh Hien has stated.

At a February 27 conference to sum up the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and deploy the 2015 PISA in Vietnam, Hien said that through the assessment, the ministry can put forward more appropriate and beneficial policies.

Initiated by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, PISA is a triennial international survey which aims to evaluate education systems worldwide by testing the skills and knowledge of 15-year-old students. The test is also designed to measure whether students can apply what they’ve learned in school to real-life problems.

Vietnam will look into the results in order to seek measures for education quality improvement and study how to apply PISA techniques and methods in national education quality assessment, he added.

Vietnam was ranked eighth in science, 17th in mathematics and 19th in reading among 65 countries and territories participating in the 2012 survey. It was the first time the country, which has the lowest per capita income among participating economies, had joined in the survey.-VNA