Since its 1975 reunification, Vietnam has aggressively attempted to standardise education with a focus on reforming its national examination system. In particular, while policy makers argue that their reforms are successful, the adverse impacts of recent high school graduation exam restructuring are cause for public concerns about the reliability of their results. Despite this, the impact of exam reform on education quality and its implication for all education change initiatives are largely untouched. This chapter seeks to address this disconnection by drawing on results of policy analysis and semi-structured in-depth interviews with high school teachers and students across Vietnam (n = 11). The findings indicate numerous problems that challenge current exam reforms, including fraud and corruption, thus undermining its overall achievements. Vietnam's long-standing exam-oriented education, pervasive achievement obsession, and non-participatory approach to reforms that excludes teachers and students in political decision making that affect them are significant part of the explanation why reform actions have made little progress. A review of the latest ambitious high school curriculum and exam reform reveals an in-the-making hybrid institutional governance of education in Vietnam. This chapter concludes with a discussion as to why the elimination of exam-oriented education is not an answer for Vietnamese education, at least for today, despite its negative consequences.