Translated material
Russian is not chosen
Capital graduates will be tested for knowledge of their native language only in the form of the Unified State Exam
Every year the Moscow Department of Education expands the list of subjects for the unified state exam. Initially distrustful of the Ministry of Education’s initiatives to replace school final exams and university entrance tests with unified tests, capital officials may emerge as leaders in the all-Russian Unified State Examination experiment. In any case, yesterday the deputy head of the Moscow Department of Education, Vladimir Razdin, said that this coming spring, the knowledge of the Russian language of eleventh grade graduates will be tested exclusively in the form of a unified state exam. Schoolchildren will no longer be able to choose between the Unified State Exam and the traditional exam.It is noteworthy that the ideology of passing the subject will also change. If in the recent past, students in the last grades wrote an essay for which two grades were given in two subjects (for literacy and for content), then from May 2007 the final exam in Russian language and literature will be divided into two. “The Russian language will be taken in the form of a unified state exam, and literature, if desired, can be taken in the form of an essay, presentation, orally on tickets or in the form of the Unified State Exam,” Mr. Razdin explained.
The innovation, according to the official, will affect approximately 72 thousand students. This is the number of graduates expected in the capital at the end of the current academic year. The army of Muscovites will most likely be joined by nonresident high school students planning to enroll in Moscow universities. The city Department of Education will open special reception centers for them for the Unified State Examination in the Russian language. At these same points, according to Vladimir Razdin, young people who are not satisfied with their grades received in the previous academic year will be able to retake the unified exam. Or graduates of previous years who did not manage to enter universities with Unified State Examination certificates. “The certificate of passing the unified exam is valid only until December 31 of the year in which it was passed,” recalled the deputy head of the Moscow Department of Education.
Let us recall that according to the preliminary plans of the Ministry of Education and Science, a unified exam should become a mandatory form of testing the knowledge of schoolchildren throughout Russia already in 2008. However, the experiment was extended for a year at the request of the Russian Council of Rectors. This year, the chairman of this professional association, the rector of Moscow State University, Viktor Sadovnichy, intends to achieve the right for leading domestic universities to conduct their own additional entrance exams. As the head of the Federal Service for Supervision in Education, Viktor Bolotov, previously explained to a Vremya Novostei correspondent, about ten leading universities in the country will have the opportunity to introduce their own tests, and their list will be approved by government decree.