Lecturer and course reviews: what to check before registering for credits

What 5 questions should a lecturer or course review answer?

A useful review is not 'he's super easy' or 'she's brutal' but an answer to the things that directly affect your grade and your time. For the same course, two lecturers can weight the coursework score differently, take attendance differently and set completely different exams. So before asking 'is this lecturer easy or hard', split that question into five smaller ones.

Vietnamese universities usually score a course on a 10-point scale, then convert to letter grades (A, B+, B…) and a 4.0 GPA, and the conversion table differs slightly by school — check your own school's training regulations for the exact table. So when someone brags 'that class was all A's', ask what score an A starts at in that school and what share the coursework score carries.

• Grading How coursework, midterm and final are weighted, whether participation or attendance earns bonus points, and whether grading is strict or lenient.
• Attendance Every session, at random, or not at all; how many absences get you barred from the exam.
• Exam format Multiple choice, essay, oral, project or open-book; whether the paper resembles past exams.
• Workload How many assignments, group projects and presentations; whether some weeks pile up.
• Teaching style Clear explanation or slide-reading, whether materials are complete, whether the schedule changes or make-up classes are frequent.

Where to ask for lecturer reviews at UEH, Bách khoa, NEU and other schools

In Vietnam, lecturer reviews are almost absent from Google; they live in each school's and each intake's Facebook groups (the 'lecturer review corner' posts in freshman groups), the school's confession page, and the class or cohort Zalo/Messenger group chats (students only, no lecturers). Search 'xin review giảng viên UEH' or 'review giảng viên Bách khoa' and what comes back is mostly group posts, not any structured page. That means to get reviews you have to ask the right group and the right cohort.

Hanoi is the same: NEU lecturer evaluations and HUST course reviews mostly scroll by in NEU Confessions (over 860,000 likes — a 2020 figure shown in search results in July 2026) and BK Confessions (about 198,000), plus each faculty's course groups; there is no structured page.

To get answered quickly, put all the details in the post: course name + section code (if any) + lecturer name + the semester you plan to take it, then ask the five points above directly instead of a vague 'how is this lecturer'. Posts with enough detail tend to get answered faster by upperclassmen, and the answers are usable rather than a single 'ok'. Document sites like Studocu or old-exam archives give you past papers and slides, but rarely a real review.

Ask for reviews in any group you like, but never send money to or buy materials from strangers in a group. Official academic information always comes from the school website and your student email (@st.ueh.edu.vn, @student.hcmute.edu.vn, @student.tdtu.edu.vn, @hcmut.edu.vn, @eiu.edu.vn).

Easy or hard lecturer: how to read reviews without getting it wrong

One person's review is just one opinion, not a verdict. Trust it more when a few different people say the same thing about the same lecturer and course within the last one or two semesters, because syllabus and grading can change between years. A review from three or four years ago, or from a different school, is close to useless.

The group phrase 'giảng viên tích đức full A' ('a merit-earning lecturer, whole class gets A') usually just means lenient grading, not a light course. You may still face a heavy project or a class of a hundred, and an all-A section last semester does not guarantee the same this semester. Conversely, 'hard lecturer' often just means strict attendance or exams that do not match old papers while the teaching is actually solid; keep those two things separate.

• Which semester? Is it from last semester or years ago; has the lecturer changed the syllabus.
• Which section? Same lecturer, but a morning or evening section, a large or small one, can be taught and graded differently.
• Actual scores? Ask for the reviewer's coursework and exam scores instead of settling for 'high marks'.
• How did they study? 'Easy' from a diligent student means something different from 'easy' from a last-minute crammer.

Is attendance strict, what is the final exam like? A 7-tag course review set

Instead of a long paragraph, you can sum up a course review in a few short tags. This makes it quick to compare several sections of the same course and reuse the notes in later semesters. Below is a 7-tag set that covers most courses: attendance, final exam, midterm, assignments, grading, materials, schedule.

When asking for a review, paste this tag set into your post so the responder only has to fill it in rather than write an essay. What you collect will be much easier to compare across sections and lecturers.

On YourCampus: On YourCampus, course reviews are written per course with this same attendance – exam format – workload tag set, so you can filter quickly instead of reading post by post. App user guide

Which lecturer to take: choosing a section from each school's timetable

To pick a lecturer you first need to see the lecturer's name in the provisional timetable, and that differs by school. UEH publishes the semester timetable as a PDF on daotao.ueh.edu.vn and has a no-login lookup page at student.ueh.edu.vn/Public that includes lecturer names. HCMUT (Bách khoa) moved fully to MyBK from semester 1 of 2025-26, TDTU uses stdportal and EIU uses the AAO portal, all requiring a student login; HCMUTE uses online.hcmute.edu.vn (login; a public lookup page has not been confirmed). Whether those login portals show lecturer names depends on the school — check when the provisional timetable opens.

The best time to ask for reviews is one to two weeks before the registration window, when the provisional timetable is out but you can still change your mind. For example HCMUT (which calls it ĐKMH) announced registration for semester 1 of 2025-26 in three rounds (17–24 June, 30 July–6 August and 19–21 August 2025); EIU opens registration two weeks before the term starts; HCMUTE splits each semester into đợt 1/đợt 2 so there is an extra add-on registration milestone for đợt 2. These dates change every year, so re-check the academic affairs office notice before each term.

Choosing a section also means checking the class hours: period (tiết) times differ by school (per the 2025-26 period schedules: Bách khoa's period 1 starts at 06:00 but regular students usually start from period 2, UEH has a 75-minute period 7, HCMUTE uses 45-minute periods starting at 07:30), so an 'easy lecturer' section that lands in an early-morning slot on a distant campus still deserves a second thought. See the period tables for each school in the article on class periods and hours.

Reviews for electives and 'which courses are easy to pass in semester 1'

In the first semester most students take common courses such as the political theory subjects, physical education and, depending on the school, national defence education in the summer term; many schools also have General Law (Pháp luật đại cương). Because so many students take them, reviews of General Law and other common courses are plentiful and easy to find; but for the same reason one course can have dozens of sections with different lecturers. So 'which course is easy to pass in semester 1' has no general answer; the right question is 'which section, which lecturer of that course'.

For elective reviews, the effective approach is to list the three or four courses you are torn between and ask upperclassmen which ones they took, with whom, and what the exam was like. Avoid stacking several courses with big projects or heavy group work into one semester just because each one was individually praised as 'easy'. At HCMUTE, courses open by đợt 1/đợt 2 (nine weeks of class then exams per đợt), so asking which đợt a course opens in matters even more.

Don't choose on 'easy' alone. If the course is a foundation for later major courses (maths, basic programming, accounting principles, for example), a lecturer who teaches solidly even if grading harder usually pays off more in the long run than an A that looks good on the transcript but leaves you with nothing.

Writing a fair course evaluation or lecturer review: how to praise and criticise without trouble

A good review is one that students in later cohorts read and immediately know whether to register. State the semester, section code and course, then tell exactly what you experienced: score weighting, attendance method, exam type, workload, and the grade you got. Cover both the good and the not-so-good, and write about the course and the teaching, not the lecturer's appearance or private life.

Grounded criticism ('40% of the exam wasn't in the slides', 'attendance every session, two absences and you're barred from the exam') is useful information and rarely causes trouble. Personal insults or made-up claims, on the other hand, get posts deleted and reported and can even land you in trouble with the school. When unsure, write about the section and your own experience and let readers draw their own conclusions.

On YourCampus: On YourCampus, course reviews are anonymous to readers but can only be written by students verified with a school email, and abusive content can be reported and removed. Just write what you actually experienced, as above. App user guide