Linor Goralik. Unified field of experiments

Unified field of experiments
Linor Goralik

Publication date: August 6, 2003

Russia is intensively experimenting with a unified state exam , designed to either equalize, increase, or otherwise change applicants’ chances of entering universities. The endless debate around this not-so-new innovation touches on a huge range of topics - from the expediency of “equalization”, fair assessment of results, the readiness of higher educational institutions to accept the exam as a given, without introducing additional competitive conditions, which actually nullify the very idea of ​​​​unified testing. In short, one can compile a long list of pressing topics concerning the existence of the exam as such. Meanwhile, there is another topic, a sticky topic, and it lies not in the conceptual or legal field, but in the financial field, or rather, in the field of private finance. This is the topic of preparation for a unified exam, the topic of the emergence of a new service industry and a new range of enterprises engaged in such preparation, and the topic of how exactly today’s institution of highly specialized tutoring is integrated into this new structure. About the specifics - scale, prices, preparation time, enrollment of students - now we can only speculate, but I don’t want to speculate. I would like to try to turn to the experience of other countries, countries where one or another form of a unified exam has existed for many years and where the exam is a fundamental milestone in pursuing one or another chosen career, a milestone that any graduate who intends to continue his education in higher educational institutions.

My personal experience allows me to talk about the existence of the Unified State Exam in two countries - Israel and the USA. In Israel, for either eight or ten years, I worked with one of the leading private institutions at that time preparing applicants for the local equivalent of the Unified State Exam. I did this first as a teacher, then as a developer of didactic programs, then, in addition to development, I was involved in testing, training and retraining of teachers. I had to deal with the American version of the Unified State Exam - the SAT exam - in the course of exchanging experiences and trying to develop new preparation strategies, relying on the rich experience of Western colleagues. It must be said that both the Israeli “psychotest” and the American SAT (I will continue to use the word “psychotest” to refer to both) are structured in many ways differently than our expected Unified State Exam: in their desire to equalize the opportunities of applicants, the creators of the exam, in the course of its historical evolution, refused from tasks that require extensive knowledge as such, and tried (let’s avoid the temptation to judge how successfully) to create a system that evaluates exactly natural abilities of the student.

This means that, for example, the Israeli test, which is divided into three large sections—quantitative reasoning, verbal reasoning, and English—tests factual knowledge only in the last section. As for the rest, the student is explained that he is supposed to know only the basic rules of geometry, four arithmetic operations, the basics of operations with fractions and a few other simple things, as well as have logical thinking and rely on common sense. At least, this is how the official instructions from the Ministry of Education describe the situation. The “quantitative thinking” section consists approximately equally of simple problems solved in one or two steps, and questions familiar to Russians from the “Test Your Abilities” books (in particular, from Eysenck’s book, which was popular at the time): eliminate the extra figure out of five, complete the sequence of numbers, find out which speaker is lying, and so on. It is believed that any person of sound mind and sound memory, who has at least completed the required number of classes in a general education school, will demonstrate his true abilities during the psychotest and demonstrate his true intellectual qualities to the admissions committee of the university he is interested in.

Then what is the huge multimillion-dollar industry of institutes, private schools, tutors, computer programs and thick books on preparing for psychotests doing? What can they give to those who only need common sense - and what can it give to Russian applicants trying to pass the Unified State Exam, which is not designed to get you into a certain institute (here the role of the tutor is clear), but simply to provide an opportunity to demonstrate school knowledge under equal conditions?

First of all, this system will be able to provide - and does provide where it already exists - psychological comfort. Research shows that the majority of examinees perform the same psychotest under stress 10-15 percent worse than in a calm environment. I remember very well how students who came to my group, who had passed a psychotest a few months earlier with what they hoped was an insufficiently high grade, at the very first lesson in the class did a trial test (structurally identical to the real one) an order of magnitude better than the real one, - simply because nothing depended on it. According to our surveys, after the second attempt at passing the state exam, students said that they felt much calmer - still, after three months of intensive preparation and five trial exams within the course, in total!

The second component of the success of those who completed the preparatory courses was the method of solving and passing. Students were given techniques for solving problems in a limited time - which is fundamentally important where the main problem is not “solve”, but “solve quickly.” The amazement of the students, who found out that almost all test problems are solved using a set of several dozen easily digestible techniques, bordered on resentment: what kind of equality of passing are we talking about if those who go to private courses know these “tricks”, but the rest do not? “Tricks,” as it turns out, concern virtually all elements of working with an exam: for example, a teacher teaches his class to choose the most likely answer even to a question about the essence of which the examinee has not the slightest idea, simply by knowing the structure of the answer structure. Already in the first lessons, the student finds out that the chaotic variety of exam problems, with all their pictures, diagrams, riddles and strange terms like “homonym”, is in fact easily divided into, again, several dozen standard types and just identifying the type of the proposed problem may be the key to quickly solving it. As a result, the number of situations where a paid course or working with a tutor does not increase the score of a person taking the Unified State Exam - and, accordingly, his chances of admission - tends to zero. Preparation one way or another gives some kind of result - more or less impressive, depending on the level of the courses or tutor, the student’s abilities and his willingness to work in anticipation of the test.

The size of the SAT preparation industry in the States is enormous. Children who are very focused on success and who are preparing to enter a university almost from the ninth grade require their parents to enroll in the most prestigious and promising preparatory courses or turn to expensive private tutors. An SAT prep course (lasting two weeks to three months) can cost anywhere from $600 to $29,000, with a decent private tutor charging $200 to $550 per hour, or up to $1,400 per day if asked to accompany a family on vacation and tutor a child there. In addition to such preparation through personal work with the student, there is a huge industry of computer programs, books, and online correspondence schools for preparing for the SAT. The price of a computer-book course can range from $200 to $1,200; the most prestigious of these publications are sometimes accompanied by the right to one or more meetings with a consultant who can “guide” the student preparing to take the exam in his work.

To increase their own competitive advantages and increase attractiveness in the eyes of applicants and the main paying public - that is, parents - institutes and private schools take the most inventive moves, sometimes bordering on crime. As far back as I can remember in Israel, there was a certain practice of removing tasks from the official state exam. Naturally, there was a ban on the actual removal of notebooks or any other records from the room where the psychotest was carried out. Therefore, preparatory schools equipped their own guidance counselors or teachers to “retake” the exam once in a while. The responsibility of this “examinee” was to pass the exam neither well nor poorly - just so that his persistent attempts to improve his grade would not arouse suspicion. In fact, throughout the entire exam, such a messenger simply monitored the fundamental changes in the exam and memorized the proposed tasks (a total of about two hundred and seventy, if my memory serves me correctly). Immediately upon leaving the examination room, the “spy” dictated what he had memorized into a voice recorder - and the true aces completed 210-220 problems at a time! Based on the material received, not only teaching methods were correlated, but also “trial” exams were compiled and offered to students. Naturally, the teacher never told the class that these problems were taken from the state exam, but subtly remarked that “you can’t even imagine how close the tasks of our trial exams are to the real ones”... The students nodded understandingly, the rumor was passed from mouth to mouth , and it became known about this or that school that they let people decide real challenges. Naturally, the students, in turn, were forbidden to take notes on “trial” exams out of class - out of harm’s way.

Additional, albeit less exciting, ways of competing are publishing the number of students who graduated from a particular school and entered prestigious universities, comparing the scores of college students before and after the course, opening separate courses for “promising” applicants - those who need a particularly high score for admission to, say, the bar or medicine, camps where training for the Unified State Exam takes place “without distractions,” and the like.

It should be assumed that if the Unified State Exam continues to live in Russia, then in the coming years we will see the flourishing of this preparatory industry - with all the pros and cons of such a situation. In a few years, we will go all the way from the chaotic flickering of small companies to the division of the market by large monsters, from possible scandals related to the corruption of the Ministry of Education, to publications about the benefits of applicants who have undergone decent training. Anyone who somehow hopes to grab a piece of this pie should take a low start today - especially since the first companies preparing graduates for the Unified State Exam in Russia already exist. True, so far in a rather modest format.