Final torture

Graduates of Russian schools for the first time passed the oral unified state exam in foreign languages. It turns out that we fell "under the distribution", we were a kind of experimental rabbits of the new examination system.

I dashed the trial work in English, when my classmates talked with the computer in the microphone, so they approached about how this was happening. My ideas about oral exams at the computer were limited to the American TOEFL, where you are being planted for a large separate computer with huge headphones, through which absolutely no third -party and irritating sounds, and your business is to complete the task and speak into the microphone.

It all started extremely standard: delivery of phones at the entrance, locker rooms, metal detectors, division into audiences, registration. Several schools gathered at the USE point, about a hundred people. It was understood that in each audience it would sit and wait for its series of 12 each. Four lines were formed for passing the exam. When you were informed that your turn had come, you moved to another audience, the one that 3-4 people passed with computers where the exam took the exam.

And the most painful was to wait for their turn. We were informed of the queue number, I came across the third. We got into the audience, they read the instructions to us, everything is like on all the exam, the camera on a tripod with a screen in our direction, so that we would only do that we looked at ourselves, further wishes for good luck, filling out the registration form, there was nothing new. The first three people from our audience, which came first, took it right away, and at first I did not envy them very much, and then sharply changed my mind on this score, because they came only after half an hour.

So, during the waiting time, we were kindly given to the magazines in English - I got a magazine about oil wells - eighty beautiful glossy pages over October 2012, each is dedicated to equipment for pitching oil. And since I am not interested in either the process of pumping out oil or the place where it occurs, the leaflet of this magazine without a single advertising of Cola I preferred an uncomfortable lying on my hand.

Graduates of 2015 became experimental rats: from the innovations - the final essay, mathematics, divided into the basic and profile level, the abolition of the test part in the exam in Russian, an oral exam in languages. Everything except the latter was in paper format, it was solved and sometimes even convenient, but the latter is a complete failure

Classmates and I looked at each other, smiled, shrugged, made faces - in general, did everything that was supposed to be incerted by the eleventh grade graduates - only non -verbal. Because it was forbidden to communicate verbally. The phones are taken away, the camera looks at us, it is categorically impossible to talk - any whisper like “how long it is ...” was punishable by strict shiking from the observers. The only entertainment, as I said, is a dream with the head on the desk or reading a magazine about the drilling of oil wells. When they shouted the third turn in an hour, and only three people were taken away, I thought in horror whether they transferred me to the fourth, because if they moved it, this means inevitable sewing the fifth point for another half hour without the opportunity to leave the audience for five minutes. But a few minutes later I was finally taken away, I exhaled and went to the audience of passing the exam.

Everything turned out to be far from as I imagined. It was very different from the good old TOEFL. There were three of us in the audience of surrender, we sat in different ends of the class behind small laptops with small unsolvid headphones. We were asked to choose one of the four background melodies to drown out the surrounding sounds. I chose. But this did not help. Although there were only three of us, my two comrades in misfortune were heard as clearly as if they were sitting nearby. They also heard me well.

I never worried about the fact that on the exam we are sitting under video cameras: in any supermarket we walk under the aim of hidden cameras, in any eatery, it is easier to say where they are not now than where they are. I was completely phlegmatic to the inspectors who vigilantly guard us. But never at the exam I had such a wild discomfort from what I was talking about with a computer, and two examiners and two more people hear me, with whom we mutually interfere with each other. I’m talking, and cameras look at me, examiners look at me, and two more hearing me, and this made the exam the most uncomfortable of all four previous ones.

Our modest business was to read an excerpt from the text in the headphone, then verbally formulate a few questions on a specific topic (“You want to take riding lessons, ask about the cost of training, evening courses and something else”), describe the picture and compare two pictures in the fourth task. For each correctly completed task, 5 points are given at the maximum, ideally only 20. The previous eighty could be scored in a written exam in English, which was June 11th.

So, the tasks have been completed, I listened to my answers - or rather, the first seconds from each, just check whether the sound signed up. Satisfied, collected things, signed, and then they showed me to my chair - I need to wait for everyone else, since one of the audience is not released. We already looked at the guy with the guy, because the third girl was impatiented to listen to all his four answers, one and a half minutes each, from beginning to end, while we preferred to limit ourselves to the first seconds and run away early. But in the end, all this was done, and we left.

And then it turned out that only everything went well and without incidents. A girl from another school cried in the corridor. She told the computer everything that was needed, but when listening to the answers, it turned out that she did not have the fourth task - it was a technical error, the microphone turned off, it was never guilt - the microphone is automatically turned on, and the student does not touch it at all and does not bear any responsibility for him. But it turned out that there was no way to subtract this very fourth task - she was appointed a retake from beginning to end on a backup day. But if she could refuse and just lose five points for an incomplete fourth task, having received 15 instead of 20, then with my classmate the story came out even more enchanting.

He spoke calmly, spoke, performed the last (also fourth) task, and then he just took and turned off the computer. He was cut out by itself, and no one is to blame for this. He cursed, found out the relationship, but nothing can be done with this - come on a backup day or stay without these 20 points for the oral part. And he chose the second - to lose points. And it can be perfectly understood-so many nerves, so much expectation in the stuffy audience without the opportunity to even talk to someone in order to get an extra hassle and prospects to wait again in the audience at the end of June, or even July, another hour or two, without any guarantee that there will be no repetition of this failure.

I am almost sure that even if these twenty points in English were important to me, I would do the same as my classmate, I would refuse. I left the house at seven in the morning, dragged me in the metro on the transplantation, stuck out in the audience for more than an hour, tried to fall asleep on my own hand in an embrace with a magazine about oil, gas and fuel, in a trembling voice, in a trembling, in order to ultimately get a computer that had beged out in the process and the complete inability of the organizers to explain my further actions. How many tears were spilled and words were said in our point of conduct, is it possible to imagine how many such cases were all over Russia? ..

I think that the experiment on the introduction of a computerized oral part in a foreign language has definitely failed. Graduates of 2015 became experimental rats: from the innovations - the final essay, mathematics, divided into the basic and profile level, the abolition of the test part in the exam in Russian, an oral exam in languages. Everything except the latter was in paper format, it was solved and sometimes even convenient, but the latter is a complete failure. If so many failures were in a chic and sophisticated school of the Central District of Moscow, we can imagine what was done in the outskirts, which have no funds for expensive equipment. All that can be said about this is Bravo, the Ministry of Education. Just brave.

Alexandra Pankina - graduate of the Moscow school