Vietnam's 2026 High-School English Exam: Easier to Breathe, Still Built to Sort

On the morning of June 12, nearly a million students across Vietnam handed in the English paper of the 2026 national high-school graduation exam. It was the most anxiously awaited subject of all: in 2025, a redesigned, far harder paper sent scores tumbling and left students shaken. So was the 2026 high-school English exam hard or easy? Here is the consensus.

💡 In short: the 2026 paper is gentler, easy enough to pass, but the 8s, 9s and 10s still belong to students who can genuinely read and reason in English.

Easier, but not a giveaway

Most teachers agree the 2026 paper is lighter than last year's, comfortable enough for average students to secure their graduation. Many expect a larger crop of perfect 10s this year. Even so, "easier to breathe" is not the same as "easy to ace": the paper keeps its power to separate the strong from the rest.

The biggest shift: the philosophy behind the paper

The exam stays true to Vietnam's 2018 General Education curriculum: gone are the isolated, rote-learned grammar and phonetics items. Instead, every piece of knowledge is embedded in context. Where the 2025 paper sorted candidates by test-taking technique, the 2026 graduation English exam grades thinking: reading comprehension, inference and the ability to process information.

Grammar and vocabulary: manageable

Familiar topics such as tenses, reduced relative clauses, comparisons and connectors sit at a medium level, quick and clean to handle. Vocabulary stretches from A2 to C1, yet stays within topics students have already studied: education, the environment, technology.

Reading: where the score is decided

This is the real gatekeeper. This year's passages are distinctly academic and cross-disciplinary, with themes such as the psychology of money, environmental economics and the smart home. To get through, candidates must handle inference questions, paraphrasing, sentence insertion, main-idea and author's-viewpoint items: skills you cannot fake with a few weeks of "tricks". Comprehensible input is the method that builds genuine reading and inference skills over months, not weeks.

The verdict

Reviewing the 2026 high-school English exam, this looks like a sensible recalibration: less pressure on the majority, while keeping the message intact. A language is learned to be used, not memorized. Students with a solid B2-and-above foundation and the habit of reading for meaning will pull ahead. Those who only cram and shy away from reasoning will struggle. If English feels out of reach, clearing up five persistent myths about language ability is a useful starting point.

What the official scores revealed: the July 2026 data

When the Ministry of Education and Training released the full score distribution on July 1, 2026, the numbers told a more complicated story than the "gentler paper" consensus from exam day. According to VnExpress, the national average for English fell to 5.07, down from 5.38 in 2025. The median dropped from 5.25 to 4.75 and the most common score fell from 5.25 to 4.25. More strikingly, 50.25% of all English candidates - over 168,000 students - scored below the passing threshold of 5.0, the highest below-average rate for English in four years, and the highest of any subject in the 2026 sitting.

The paradox is real, but it has a structural explanation. Since 2025, English is no longer compulsory: students who feel weak in English can choose a different elective. But at the same time, many of the strongest English students - those with IELTS, TOEFL or Cambridge certificates - increasingly use those scores directly for university admission and do not sit the national exam at all. The result is a bifurcated distribution: a thin but growing group of high scorers, and a large middle-to-lower band.

The high-end data bears this out. Perfect scores (10/10) more than doubled, from 141 in 2025 to 311 in 2026. Among provinces, Hanoi led the country with a provincial average of 5.549, followed by Tuyen Quang and Ho Chi Minh City. Only 6 of Vietnam's 63 provinces and cities reached the national average. The standard deviation widened from 1.45 to 1.68, confirming greater spread in performance. For students preparing for the 2027 sitting, spaced repetition builds the kind of lasting vocabulary knowledge that closed-book exam conditions demand, at a level no last-minute crammer can replicate.

What was the national average score for English in the 2026 THPT exam?

The Ministry of Education published official results on July 1, 2026: the national average was 5.07, down from 5.38 in 2025. The median fell from 5.25 to 4.75 and the most common score dropped to 4.25. Some 50.25% of the 334,547 English candidates scored below 5.0, the highest below-average rate for English in four years. Perfect 10s more than doubled, from 141 to 311. Hanoi led provincial averages with 5.549.

Why did English scores fall even though the 2026 exam was reportedly easier?

Two structural forces explain the paradox. First, with English now an elective, students who are weakest in the language opt out - removing the worst-performing tail, yet leaving a heavy middle. Second, many of the strongest English students bypass the national exam entirely by using IELTS, TOEFL or Cambridge certificates for university admission. Add a paper that genuinely rewards reading and reasoning rather than rote grammar, and the gap between prepared and underprepared candidates widens, which the standard deviation rising from 1.45 to 1.68 confirms.

About the author

This review is by Dao Huy (Lucas), a professional translator working across four languages: English, Vietnamese, Chinese and French (EN ↔ VI ↔ ZH ↔ FR). With 7+ years in medical, legal, financial and academic translation, he provides English-Vietnamese translation, certified document translation and multilingual localization. Need a quote for an EN / VI / ZH / FR translation project? Visit daohuy.com.