British Council resumes Aptis exam following education ministry’s approval

The Ministry of Education and Training on Friday allowed five companies to conduct Aptis exams with the British Council for five years. They are the British Council company in Vietnam, the Vietnam Trading and Development Education company, the Education and Era Communication company, the ETE Vietnam company and the Times Education Development and Technology company. The exam venues are in Hanoi, Hai Phong, Thua Thien-Hue and HCMC, and the certificate is the Aptis ESOL International Certificate.

The ministry has requested parties to abide by Vietnamese regulations regarding the organization of foreign language proficiency exams, including criteria about the exams, the registration process, infrastructure and equipment, security and confidentiality.

The ministry said it is requesting the British Council to hasten procedures so the IELTS exam, as well as others, would be resumed as normal.

Several foreign language proficiency exams conducted in Vietnam have been postponed in the past few months, including the IELTS and Aptis exams by the British Council, which announced their postponements on Wednesday. The Aptis is used by several Vietnamese universities as a foreign language benchmark for graduating students.

Donna McGowan, director of the British Council in Vietnam, on Thursday told VTV24 that thousands of Vietnamese students would be affected by the postponement of the IELTS exam.

Besides the IELTS, sexams for other foreign language certificates, like the HSK for Chinese or the Nat-test for Japanese, have also been postponed.

The education ministry on Thursday 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.