"Yamba from chorea..."

This year, the Unified State Exam will become the main method of enrollment in universities.

At the end of May, schools began taking the Unified State Exam. Unlike previous years, this is now the main route to university enrollment. To obtain a school certificate, you must successfully pass the Unified State Exam in mathematics and the Russian language. Applicants wishing to enroll in a university will also have to pass several additional Unified State Exams in the profile of the chosen educational institution. A young person who does not intend to enter a university immediately after finishing 11th grade will be able to complete the required Unified State Examination at any school at the place of registration. And although children, parents and teachers are slowly beginning to come to terms with the new certification system, discontent and controversy have not yet subsided. Read about the responses of parents, students and university staff in the essay by Alexander Litoy.

Unified State Exam - a single headache

“There is confusion and uncertainty in universities,” complains Alexey Solopov, head of the department of classical philology at the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University. — Admissions committees will now have to work not just for one month, but throughout the summer and part of September. Because the Unified State Examination competition is held in three stages. First, applicants will send their Unified State Exam results, and members of the admissions committee will select those who pass. At the second stage, it looks to see if everyone who, for example, MSU wants to see at home, wants to go to MSU, and not somewhere else. At the third stage, the final version of the list of freshmen is determined. All this promises to be long, painful and inconvenient.”

“It is not clear what will happen if there are more people who want to enroll with us and have passed the passing grade than we have places - no one will create new places! The provisions on the Unified State Examination have many loopholes and uncertainties, and there is a vast scope for corruption. There are known stories about the extraordinary performance of Dagestan schoolchildren, with the fact that in many regions they offered, for example, 160 thousand rubles. for all A's on the Unified State Examination. But we do not have the right to double-check those who send their results! These will quickly fly out of Moscow State University, but what if there are a lot of them? There will be a shortage of students at the faculties! There are university Olympiads, in which up to 40% of first-year students can be enrolled. But in classical philology, which I study, there are no olympiads and there are no plans. All this is a cruel experiment on teachers and young people,” he is sure.

“The results have not yet been announced, the exams have just begun, it is not yet possible to judge how difficult they are, how adequately they are compiled,” continues the applicant’s father, Vadim Damier. — Judging by the trial tests that took place in the spring, in Russian, for example, the Unified State Exam is quite adequate to the school curriculum. Although it is not clear whether all schools teach it well enough. Maybe my daughter was just lucky. In general, the inconsistency between the school curriculum and the Unified State Exam is visible. The situation with literature and history is the talk of the town. Well, it’s impossible to understand from questions about minor details, about, for example, the name of the wife of some passing character, whether the child understands the topic or whether he has read the book. It is unclear to what extent all this is included in the current Unified State Exam.”

It also seems to him that “the mathematics curriculum has, in principle, become more difficult than in Soviet times.”

V. Damier also notes that “the tests consist of parts “A”, “B” and “C”. "C" is considered the most important, but the material on it is the least explained in school. In the case of literature, the “C” is the essay. The student is given a text and asked to formulate his opinion, based on examples from life and literary works. Not from school programs, but from any. And you never know who a child can name. Chuck Palahniuk? What if Gunter Grass? And it is unclear how teachers will react to this. Essays must be graded by two independent teachers; if they have serious disputes, a third should be brought in. They don’t take away mobile phones for the Unified State Exam; you can definitely go to the toilet once. So there is probably an opportunity to cheat. The only advantage of the Unified State Exam is the ability to try to get into several universities at the same time. It’s good that the Unified State Exam can be retaken next year.”

The applicant’s father believes that “the Unified State Exam does not at all equalize the chances of talented children; higher education continues to come down to the problem of the wallet. You need to prepare for it with tutors, that’s for sure. And the cost of classes reaches up to 1500 rubles. at one o'clock. There is significantly less control over university Olympiads, which also give the right to admission, than there was for entrance exams. The reduction of free places continues. For example, there are now free places in the prestigious world economy at RUDN University. five. I can’t believe that you can enroll there only through the Unified State Examination, without cronyism.”

“We haven’t had any violations at school yet; According to my daughter, they didn’t allow me to write it off. But the attitude towards the Unified State Exam is very negative,” says the applicant’s mother, Natalya Kim. — To the question: “In what meter was Nekrasov’s poem “The Poet and the Citizen” written?” -my daughter wrote it in iambic tetrameter. And this is correct, and teachers do not argue with this. But the correct answer “iamb” is entered into the computer - and that’s it, it will be counted as an error. I graduated from the journalism department of Moscow State University and work as an editor. I saw how they define literary devices, such as allusion. I couldn’t name anything, because everything was formulated in a very stupid way.

Perhaps in the West this system has justified itself, but here it is being implemented by force. In the West, they teach you to write tests from the potty, they lead you to it logically, but throughout the two thousand years our children were taught in the old way. Last year, almost 70 people who entered the Unified State Exam were expelled from the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics.”

GIA - minor headache

In addition to the Unified State Examination itself, the State Final Examination is also carried out - “State Final Certification” for ninth-graders and final annual work for tenth-graders, also according to the rules of the Unified State Exam. And this, of course, is reasonable. This is a good way to train your child. “The Unified State Exam is not held in all schools. In ours, for example, this year there is only GIA. Our eleventh graders take another exam. Observers from other schools are also present at the GIA, but still people still understand everything - when necessary, they go out to drink tea, and teachers help their children. And it seems to me that during the Unified State Exam they will also turn a blind eye to many things - otherwise there will be too many people who fail,” suggests school teacher Denis M.

But there is dissatisfaction here too. “The GIA grades will be summed up with the annual grades and will be used as a certificate of completion of 9th grade,” says the mother of a ninth-grader, Yulia Gruzdeva. “For a year, children were prepared for the GIA. And for the last quarter that's all they did. I think this is wasted time; it would be better if the children were given more new material. To write tests, you need not only accuracy, but also speed. I am a proofreader, but I couldn’t pass the Russian tests. And the teachers had complaints that the tasks were incomprehensible to the children. They are not designed for children with unconventional thinking: at our parents’ meeting, teachers said that one excellent student girl would probably have problems. Although, on the contrary, there is an element of probability; 25% (since four options are offered) can be guessed by chance, without even knowing. Mobile phones and crib sheets were prohibited, but they were carried in anyway.”

“When we took the test, an unfamiliar woman watched; the teachers stood in front, at the first desks. They gave us four hours, but many finished in two or three. Calculators, cheat sheets, mobile phones - we used all this, even though it was impossible. But it was more difficult to cheat than usual on tests. It seems to me that this system is not bad - it covers many more topics compared to regular tests,” thinks ninth-grader Anton.

“If you don’t pass the GIA, you can retake it, but then in the tenth grade you will end up in a regular school, and not in a lyceum,” explains lyceum student Roman. — You had to arrive at 8.15, at 8.30 they announced by last name who would write in which office, at 8.55 the text was read for the first time, at 9.05 for the second time. This is an exposition. At 10.10 they handed out dictionaries. Everything had to be handed in at 10.40. The second part of the Russian exam is tests with options for the correct answer or where you need to enter it yourself. And at the end there was a short essay. The exam ended at 13.00. In algebra, the first part had to be completed in an hour and a half. If eight or fewer of the 16 tasks are completed, this is immediately a two. Then they were given two and a half hours for five more tasks. Their decisions had to be described in detail, but the first ones only needed an answer. Multiplication tables and sheets of formulas were given. Despite the prohibitions, there were cheat sheets and calculators.”

“We only took algebra and literature. The results only affect the grade in the subject this year,” says tenth-grader Olga. — We wrote with our teachers. Part “A”, the easiest part where you need to choose an answer, was not there. In part “B” you had to write the answer yourself, in part “C” there was an essay. In mathematics "C" there were problems of increased complexity. I didn’t decide “C”, but this will not affect my admission to university. You could go out once, giving the task to the teacher, and only one at a time. I had a cheat sheet in my drafts - they didn’t notice. They used calculators from under the table, and cell phones in the toilet. In general, I don’t like all this - when they teach not the subject, but how to pass tests. The Unified State Exam should either be abolished or made optional along with exams.”

Anti-EGE

The situation with the Unified State Examination has not yet been finally resolved. In Orenburg, Barnaul, Novosibirsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Noyabrsk, Khabarovsk, Komsomolsk-on-Amur, Tyumen, Perm, Yaroslavl and Moscow, rallies were held this spring against the new examination system. Although the Supreme Court recognized the Unified State Exam as legal, a new protest campaign was launched. The All-Russian Education Foundation is planning a new class-action lawsuit from people who will have a variety of problems with exams this year. So, most likely, there will be at least noticeable changes to the current system.