Fit for history

In the summer of 2006, the selection committee of the Institute of Philology and History at the RSUSU will receive an extra weekend. Members of the commission will not need to accept the usual history exam - he will replace the assessment on a single state exam (USE), which the applicants will be counted automatically. The exam is an exam in the form of a test for graduates and applicants. True, historians are not particularly happy with an extra weekend. “There is such a test - explosion in the traffic police to knowledge of the rules of the road, there you also need to choose the correct answer from several options,” says the historian of the RSU Leonid horizons. “I don’t know how this form of traffic safety exam affects, but the story in the form of the exam will affect the story of the exam.”

The debates about the effectiveness of exams tests began in 2001, when the USE appeared. Moscow was a symbol of resistance. He was headed by the rector of Moscow State University Viktor Sadovnichy. He insisted and insists that the assessment received on the exam is too abstract and does not speak much about a potential student. For the efforts of the capital's rector's lobby, Moscow completely ignored the Unified State Examination for four years. The capital made the first assignment last year, agreeing to hold the exam in the Russian language and history for those who wish - less than 10% of Moscow graduates came to see it. But a week ago, under the pressure of an agency for supervision in the field of education, the capital still broke: now in the form of tests you can take graduate school exams in ten subjects and at one time entering universities - mandatory. A story was sacrificed to the “obligation”. All Moscow universities (with the exception of Moscow State University, not subordinate to the Ministry of Education and Science) canceled traditional entrance exams on this subject, in return, undertaking to count the results of the exam. That is, it will be possible to finish the school without the exam in history, but for the end of the pedagogical university, for example, it is no longer any way to do without it. The metropolitan historians silently swallowed the pill, although they hid the resentment: from the worldview, their discipline risks turning into a formal one, and random people who learned a set of dates can go into historians.

Russian graduates have been passing the exam for the fifth year, but it is still considered an experimental form of the exam. In 2001, the USE was handed over only in five regions of the country, now at 80, and they are not allowed to choose between the traditional exam and the new form almost anywhere. Now the USE options exist for almost all school subjects. Most often they pass mathematics (last year, the share of this subject among all the exam was 42%) and the Russian language (41%). Much less than 11-graders passed physics, social studies and biology (4 %each). The rarest exam-objects are liters and foreign languages ​​(less than 0.5%).

All the exam, regardless of the subject, are organized the same. In the first part, the simplest, you need to choose one correct answer from the four proposed; In the second task is more complicated: the answer is one-two words or the restoration of the priority of events. For example, in the first part of the history test, a simple question is “in what year did the withdrawal of Soviet troops from the countries of Eastern and Central Europe began? 1) 1968, 2) 1979, 3) 1989, 4) 1995. " In the second, it is necessary to place in chronological order a standing on the Ugra River, the Kulikovo and Poltava battles and the ice battle.

In the third part, without which it will not be possible to get “excellent”, you need to not choose the finished answer, but write it yourself-in the shortest, in three to five sentences. To verify such self -expression, the inspection expert has a codifier - the list of approximately formulated correct options. For example, a task where it is necessary to confirm or refute the opinion of “some historians” that the new political thinking was “a step taken under the pressure of the West, and the abandonment of their own national positions”. The answers in the codifier are as follows: I agree, since “ties with the countries of Eastern Europe” were “torn apart”, “weakened the defense capabilities of Russia”, “the collapse of the USSR made the United States the only superpower”. Or I do not agree, because as a result of "the beginning of the destruction of the whole class of rocket-ore weapons was laid," this "contributed to the discharge of tension", "the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan was carried out." I agree or disagree with the charge - it does not matter, you only need to give one of those answers that are in the codifier.

Many historians from the very beginning of the experiment did not like this form of exam. “[With the help of the exam] we can only check the memoriality and confidence of the respondent,” Alla Zaboenkova, deputy dealership of the university named after Kant in Kaliningrad, reads. “To get a three, we must correctly answer questions of the first part. And they can simply guess them. ” Of course, she continues to know the dates and names of the rulers to the graduate, but in order to enter the university at the faculty, where knowledge of history is required - Istfac or Yurfak, - this is not enough. You can truly test knowledge only on an oral exam, Pabienkov believes, and even forgive the applicant that is really orienting in the historical process in the date.

Last year, when the examination of the exam in history was voluntary in Moscow, only 595 people passed it-then it was accepted, for example, at the Russian University of Friendship of Peoples among future historians and diplomats, in the Higher School of Economics among future political scientists, philosophers or business journalists. In Moscow, universities and individual faculties where they surrender history, about 30, will come several thousand people - there are few in the scale of the city. That is why-from the comparative unpopularity of the exam on history-the predicted and became a victim of pressure from the education agency in the field of education, teachers believe. According to Igor Fedorov, the rector of Baumanki and the head of the Union of Rectors of Moscow Universities (the decision made the Union along with the Moscow Education Department), it is easier to organize the exam on history than in mathematics or physics - the time remains in a sawn -outway, and “historians” are less than, for example, “mathematicians”. There was another option - biology, says negotiation participant, but all the medical services rebelled against biology, and the biology was defended. And the story was not able to.

“This is a sad event for the community of Russian historians,” Leonid horizons from the Russian State University resume. “It is not easy to take good agiturists-historians, and according to the results of the exam, it is almost impossible not to conduct an additional oral interview.” True, there are some advantages, his colleague from LNS Valery Ostrovsky, author of the school textbook on Russian history for high school students, believes: “It is necessary to check the knowledge of dates and names at least so that I, a university teacher, do not hear the answer“ Some kind of Georgian ”-but this happens. The school should give general knowledge on the subject, conditionally - the knowledge of the causes of the revolution, its participants and disputes between them. And a deep understanding of historical processes, building long historical chains - we will speak with them at the university. ”

Capital historians encourages at least the fact that the level of issues of the exam is now higher than two or three years ago, when there were no answers and questions with two or three correct answers instead of one. Now there are no more obvious flaws in the tasks, says Evgeny Markelov, the historian, director of the Moscow Intellectual School, but for the humanities - the techno, whom, in fact, historical faculties are guided by, - they still do not fit: “Smart children have always been poorly handed over and will take tests: they begin to think where they just need to put down the pegs. As a result, the level of teaching history at school will fall-we will go deeper into the causes, when it is possible to simply train in 2-3 months to surrender the dough, and the plaintiffs will receive not the applicants that they need. ” For an oral or written exam, you need to prepare for at least a year, and preferably one and a half to two, says Konstantin Fadeev, a tutor with 20 years of experience, a teacher of Moscow State University. Both Markelov and Fadeev hope that the obligatory exam in history is a temporary measure and will not last long. Altai schoolchildren were also counting on the abolition of the exam when they wrote to the local center of the exam: “They say that in Moscow the exam was canceled. Maybe we will be canceled? " On the site’s website, they were not seriously, or jokingly answered: “Today they received a letter from the Ministry of Education, in which it is written in large letters: the exam - the time.”