Reform of Technical Subject Examination with Multiple Choice – Essay Writing Exam Forms

For ages, oral and essay writing exams have been used for evaluating the knowledge on technical subjects given to the students at Vietnam Maritime University (VIMARU) and other universities in Vietnam as well. These two examination forms showed a lot of weak points such as limited exam content, no objectiveness and big consumption of time in evaluation. It is the time a reform needed to be done. Reform of technical subject examination with multiple choice- essay writing exam forms is presented in this research paper. Multiple choice exams have already widely been applied to the subjects in the fields as economics, social sciences and foreign languages, etc, but rather humble to technical ones; because, using only single, multiple choice exam forms for evaluating the students’ knowledge on such a subject is not quite reliable or adequate. The situation will be improved with the examination reform. It was proved by carrying out experiments at VIMARU from year 2003 up to now. In this paper, the methods of preparation of multiple choice-essay writing combined exam questionnaires, especially, multiple choice questionnaires of problems, and the organization of the combined exams are also studied and presented.