| The Ministry of Education continues to experiment with the Unified State Exam One of the key elements of Russian educational reform will undergo changes again. Minister of Education and Science Andrei Fursenko said the other day in Yaroslavl, at a meeting of the region’s pedagogical council, that the methods of conducting the unified state exam need to be revised. “We are in no way abandoning the idea of a unified state exam. But we believe that many things will require changes in the technology of conducting the Unified State Exam,” he said. According to the minister, “this year has given a lot of food for thought,” and “unfortunately, in a number of regions, the results of the Unified State Exam call into question its global objectivity.”
Discussions about the objectivity of the unified exam have been going on for several years. From the very first days of his tenure as head of the main educational department, Andrei Fursenko criticized the universal exam, at the same time never daring to cancel one of the main projects of his predecessor, Vladimir Filippov. Mr. Fursenko is still convinced today that the system for assessing the quality of education should be uniform throughout Russia, regardless of the person’s place of education, and “should become the basis for determining the future fate of the student.” However, over several years of experimentation, it was not possible to find the optimal form of testing, which, on the one hand, would suit the quality of universities that place higher demands on applicants than in school, and on the other hand, would not deprive high school students from the outback of hope for obtaining higher education at the best universities in the country.
In addition, Andrei Fursenko faced the exact opposite problem. Wanting to recruit more students, many regional universities apparently decided to help applicants pass the difficult exam. The minister refused to elaborate on the details, but said that he was already “fearing whether individual regions might be tempted to adapt their system for assessing the quality of education in such a way as to use existing opportunities to more or less legally achieve good results on the Unified State Exam without improving the quality of training.” students, but due to some technological steps.” The minister promised to discuss these cases together with members of the Union of University Rectors in September, when the results of the 2005 entrance campaign will be finally summed up. “After these consultations, the further development of a unified system for assessing the quality of education and the Unified State Exam will be determined,” Andrei Fursenko noted. It is worth noting, however, that similar consultations with rectors, many of whom are fundamentally opposed to testing, were held many times. However, there are no radical changes in the technology of the unified exam.
It is noteworthy that the educational reform, which has already dragged on for a whole five years, but has not brought fundamental changes, has become a problem not only for professionals. As the presidential administration’s department for working with citizens’ appeals reported at the end of last week, the situation in the education sector has become one of the main problems that Russians write to Vladimir Putin about. In the first half of this year alone, over 58 thousand letters on education issues were sent to the president. According to the department's report, Russians are primarily concerned about the decrease in the level of state responsibility for schools after the transfer of secondary education to local authorities, as well as the commercialization of general and higher vocational education. Kirill VASILENKO |
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