Dembel certificate

The latest edition of the law on the Unified State Exam will give a second chance to failed applicants and military personnel

Using the Unified State Exam certificate, you will be able to enter the university twice. This was stated yesterday by the head of the Federal Service for Supervision in Education, Viktor Bolotov, commenting on the latest innovations included in the law on the Unified State Exam , recently signed by President Vladimir Putin. “Previously, the Unified State Exam results were valid for only one year, and if a person did not have time to enter a university, he had to take the unified exam again the next year,” he explained. - Now the applicant has the opportunity to enter a university with the same scores next year. His certificate will be valid until December 31 of the year following the year of receipt.” In addition, according to the head of Rosobrnadzor, additional benefits will be provided to those retiring from military service. When entering a university, demobilizers will be able to use the results of a single exam passed a year before conscription into the army.

The government tried to take into account in the new law the position of opponents of the unified exam, providing for alternative ways of admitting students that had long been promised to the rectors. Literally in the last days of discussion of the bill, an amendment was made to the document expanding the list of Olympiads, the winners of which will receive the right to extraordinary admission to higher education. If previously only winners of All-Russian Olympiads had the right to non-competitive admission to a federal-level university, now such a loophole has been left for interuniversity Olympiads. True, the list of interuniversity Olympiads will be approved annually by the Ministry of Education and Science, Mr. Bolotov warned.

Let us remind you that the new examination rules will come into force in January 2009. From now on, final tests for school graduates will be conducted only in the Unified State Exam format. Over the remaining two years, the regions will have to polish the technical side of testing, and the executive and legislative authorities will have to decide on the set of subjects required for the final certification of a schoolchild. As Viktor Bolotov explained to Vremya Novostei, the possibility of replacing compulsory mathematics with history for students in specialized humanities classes is now being discussed.

In addition, a procedure for conducting additional entrance tests for the country's leading universities has yet to be developed. The law provides for this possibility, but there is still no clear understanding of how this will happen. In particular, representatives of the Ministry of Education and Science fear that elite universities may actually begin to give additional benefits to students of their own commercial preparatory courses. The right to additional exams is granted to leading universities due to the increased complexity of their educational programs, but, according to officials, this should not deprive citizens of the right to equal access to higher education.

Kirill VASILENKO