How to buy the Unified State Exam in the Caucasus

This year, just over 31 thousand students are taking the Unified State Exam in Dagestan. The regional Ministry of Education and Science says that the most popular subjects among students, in addition to the compulsory ones, are social studies, history, biology, chemistry and physics.

The results of the first exam - Russian language - annually advertised Dagestan as a champion of corruption in the Unified State Examination system: the results in this subject were not just one of the best in the country, but amazing. PublicPost spoke with those who participated in the Unified State Examination in the Russian language in Dagestan.

City graduates ran to the mountains to get points

A representative of the Dagestan Ministry of Education, Patimat Musabekova, told a PublicPost correspondent that no complaints have yet been received regarding the conduct of the Unified State Exam: “We have hotlines where you can report violations, but so far no one has called. Last year, for example, there were no telephone numbers at all.” They called, for example, and said that someone’s relatives went into the exam hall, that the observers were behaving incorrectly, but this year there are no complaints at all, if we are talking specifically about the first exam. I think it’s most likely a matter of lowering the minimum points.”

According to Musabekova, the majority of graduates this year will be from rural areas: “This is not because there are so many rural residents. Many of those who were supposed to graduate from school this year transferred to rural schools. Well, you yourself, probably , you understand why."

Students taking the Unified State Exam freely used phones, Magomed Magomedov, a journalist for the Dagestan publication Chernovik, who was an observer at the exam, told PublicPost: “What I saw happens from year to year at every exam. Photographing work, taking work out of the classroom, using handsets - I observed all this today, while taking the Unified State Exam in Russian. But I must say that the observers confiscated the phones of the most arrogant students and tried to somehow maintain order. There were FSB officers there too, of course, all of them. I saw them. In a conversation with me, they said that if they start confiscating phones from students, then they will all have to be expelled, and this, as the specialists said, will start a revolution throughout the republic.”

According to Magomedov, teachers complained that many students transferred to rural schools: “I personally spoke with the director of Makhachkala school No. 13. She complained that even the best students - medal winners - play it safe and go to villages. It’s easier to score high on the Unified State Exam there. everything, and it doesn’t hurt your pocket.”

“It will take two hundred thousand for all the exams”

The Russian language for Dagestani parents is very cheap, on average 25 thousand rubles, Ismail Omarov, a teacher of Russian language and literature, told PublicPost. It was he who helped pass the Unified State Exam in the Babayurt district: “For several years now, I have been making extra money by taking the Unified State Exam for students. Their parents bring me assignments, I fill out these papers. That’s all that is required of me. I take a little myself - 15 thousand rubles. A maximum of three works can be done. In the city, the amount reaches 50 thousand. But the Russian one is inexpensive. The work on this subject costs at least 60 thousand."

In addition to paying for the work, there are other expenses, the mother of a student taking the Unified State Exam in Khasavyurt, Patimat Alkhasova, told PublicPost: “My son is entering a Rostov university, we ourselves are from Makhachkala, but our son graduated from the eleventh grade in the Khasavyurt district. In Makhachkala, I wouldn’t have money for everything. There, for example, they charge up to 15 thousand rubles just to take out the work, and it costs even more - 20-25 thousand. I still don’t think that the money goes to those who fill out the work for all the exams. and his son will have four of them, he will spend a total of two hundred thousand.”

A graduate from the Gunibsky district of Dagestan, Murad Musaev (not his real name), told PublicPost about how he passed the exam: “For a whole year we were scared that the exam would be held to the fullest extent: telephone communications would be jammed, surveillance cameras would be installed in the classroom, we would go to the toilet it would be possible with two observers, etc. But nothing like that happened. Parents gave us two thousand rubles so that some students could throw our work out of the windows to their parents, so we could talk on the phone. For example, I wrote an essay through. ICQ - the teacher sent him there to me. Even the observers themselves sometimes helped.”

Unified State Examination tourism in Dagestan

Although the unified state exam was aimed at reducing corruption in education, nothing like this happened in Dagestan, says the head of the Makhachkala private educational center Davud Zulumkhanov: “The level of education in Dagestan, in my opinion, is getting worse every year. And the Unified State Exam is partly for this helps students see that whether they study well or not, in the end their efforts will yield little - parents will decide everything. If before they paid to get in, now they just pay for the Unified State Exam, but there are only a few of them." .

Should we expect scandals with high Unified State Exam scores in Dagestan this year? A source in the Dagestan Ministry of Education told PublicPost that in terms of the number of excellent students, the republic is unlikely to become a leader in Russia: “Information processing centers, where Unified State Exam results will be sent for verification, have already been given instructions so that there are no clearly better papers with good scores. As far as I know, such an order came from the government of the republic, and there from Moscow, as they say. For example, last year they also worked according to this scheme, but then it was more of a rehearsal. Of course, appeals can be filed based on these points, but you saw for yourself how it happens. Is this really a procedure with us? It’s frayed nerves, it’s endless arguments for every point, it’s huge queues, paperwork.”

According to the source, the policy to lower scores may also be dictated by the fact that in the future Dagestan risks becoming a republic where people from other regions will travel to get high scores: “There are internal statistics of our department, from which you can find out about the number of students in the republic. On September 1, 2012, about two thousand students not from Dagestan went to study in rural schools in the eleventh grade. These are mostly schoolchildren from Moscow, Krasnodar, and Rostov. The students themselves may not be in school, but they will come to the Unified State Exam. It’s just that their parents pay bribes to school directors, and problems with attending classes are removed.”