From the exam forward, not back!

Over the more than 10-year history, a single state examination has not become a consensus subject in an educational environment. Criticism of the exam is no longer only teachers and university teachers. In early April, the head of the Academy of Sciences Alexander Sergeyev spoke out for the abolition of the exam, and even earlier a corresponding bill was submitted to the State Duma. However, is there an alternative to a single exam? Boris Shalyutin , Dok. Philos. Sciences, professor, vice -rector of the Institute for the Development of Education and Social Technologies (Kurgan), believes that the pluses of the exam can be preserved by improving its mechanism.

It is not surprising that passions boil around the exam. On the one hand, these are the fate of children, on the other, giant money. The burdensome exacerbation on the eve of the exams today has found close to clinical forms, probably also on the eve of the expected changes in chairs and persons on the Russian scientific and educational Olympus.

I'll start with a small story. At the beginning of the zero, when the obligation of the exam was only a vague prospect and it was possible to choose the forms of commissioning, a small study was conducted at the University of Kurgan, exclusively “for internal use” and for the simplest practical purpose - to choose the best way to select the most prepared and promising applicants. The essence of the study was that for each of these methods the nature of the relationship between the estimates obtained on entrance tests, on the one hand, and a set of other characteristics expressing the level of preparedness of applicants, on the other, was analyzed. The main result was amazing. At the specialties with the highest competition, traditional exams revealed a negative correlation : the weakest were received, and red light lit up in front of capable children. The CT already forgotten today (centralized testing, partly the prototype of the exam, but is worse organized), and with a large margin of plus turned out to be a little better. This is easy to explain: only the organizers could influence the CT at the local level, the traditional exams - a wide and unlimited circle of people, at that stage - almost no one. The situation at the KSU regarding the organization of entrance tests was perhaps even more typical (I then worked as a vice -rector for educational work and knew well the state of affairs both at home and the neighbors). The next year, we left only the exam, and after another year or two it became mandatory throughout the country. Crowds of blatmeisters, bribe takers and scammers were mostly left with nothing. The aggressive resistance of opponents of the exam came from some rectors and other persons involved, the beneficiaries of the previous system, from those parents who hoped to attach problem children to the curves, from weak school directors and teachers, whose failure of the exam made obvious.

With the introduction of the exam, we received: a strong anti -corruption mechanism (far from absolute: stories with individual regions and “examination tourism” are well known), the opportunity without leaving the house to take exams to several universities and, accordingly, a significant expansion of prospects for capable children not from the capitals; In addition, a good tool for evaluating and comparing schools and regions regarding the quality of secondary education. These are pluses. Now about the minuses.

Another story. The end of the 1990s. In an oral entrance exam on the liability, the applicant begins to juggle the most complicated Kantian terminology. One of the examiners, suspecting a stupid cramming, deliberately asks an incorrect question with the false base: if he begins to answer, then he does not understand anything. However, the applicant, having measured the examiner with a contemptuous gaze, begins to chew him the incorrect question. The guy, of course, received the highest score that he would never have on the exam, since he had no so hot factology.

A standard commentary on this story: geniuses must be taught facts. So, no. The point is not only in the information society, when any specific information is always at hand. There is a contradiction between mechanical memorization and understanding. Understanding or misunderstanding through a living dialogue is detected much better - through how a person selects words, how he corrects himself, how he reacts to replicas, how he intonates speech, etc. This is especially true for humanitarian disciplines, where there is no worked out system of tasks of different levels of complexity. But in the “exact” sciences, every experienced examiner knows that only the solution of very non -standard tasks in itself indicates an understanding; In other cases, you need to listen to how a person explains his decision. We lost these undoubted advantages of an honest traditional exam with the exam.

But the worst is not the worst. The best tutors who regularly prepare the Stoballniks say that a purely technical component of the training of the exam can add if you transfer to a five -point scale, more than a point. Therefore, the mass school in senior, especially in graduation, is simply replacing training - that is, work on the development of material - training through which it is much easier to obtain equal increment of points than through the desire to ensure understanding. And do not say that the degradation of mass secondary education entails completely different factors. Of course, they also attract. But the USE contribution to this vile business is very great.

Separately - and this is also very important - I must say that this training causes great harm to children. The point is not only that in the most powerful guys she cannot but cause disgust. This is essentially a meaningless, alienated type of activity, which is directly opposite to the formation of a strategically important personal attitude to knowledge and knowledge, without which its creative application is impossible. The activity deprived of meaning cripples brains, breaks the creative potential of a person at the very beginning, and in addition, extremely negatively affects the educational process and personality formation itself.

Improving the exam, one cannot but admit, it is constantly going on, but the described difficulties are of a fundamental nature and are insurmountable within its framework. In recent years, the USE was supplemented in some cases of the possibility of an additional exam, as well as the Olympiads. Both of these paths, which with foam at the mouth defended the same categories that resisted and resist the exam, brilliantly established themselves as loopholes. This additionally shows that with a simple abolition of the exam, we will not only lose very difficult to achieve real and important advantages, but also collapse the selection mechanism to universities. Today, only frostbitten populists or intellectually virgin characters can demand this, since the consequences will be catastrophic. But the costs of preserving the exam, even taking into account some of the planned modifications inside it, are too large.

What to do? I think this is just the case where there is a solution-thanks to modern information and communication technologies. It is not easy, not fast, it requires a large organizational and substantive study, modeling, testing, etc. But it is real. Moreover, it seems to me that it lies on the surface, and it is amazing that there is no movement in its direction or at least discussion. I deliberately do not touch the mass of implementation problems, which I can know how much it can be represented on the shore. In the implemented form, the technology should look something like this.

For each subject subject, a commission is created on a country scale, including about as many people as previously involved in entrance tests to all Russian universities. Exams are passed on the basis of universities. But they are surrendered online; The applicant can be in Yekaterinburg, and the examiners are one in Moscow, the other in Astrakhan, the third in Vladivostok, and who exactly will take the exam from this applicant, is determined by means of random numbers on the day of delivery. Each examiner sets his score, the arithmetic mean in the test. Passing the exam is recorded. The principle, I think, is clear, the details should inevitably be adjusted along the way. As a result, you get a mechanism, firstly, preserving all the pluses of the exam (and, by the way, seriously surpassing it in anti-corruption potential), and secondly, largely restoring the lost advantages of traditional entrance tests.

The proposed mechanism gives rise to many questions, not only organizational and technical, but also on the merits. For example, the exam, unlike previous exams, simultaneously crowns secondary education and begins higher. Should this unity be preserved? How to correlate a new order with a division into basic and profile levels, and can they save them at all? Both these and other social and theoretical aspects of the proposed transformations should become the subject of a serious professional discussion. The need for changes becomes or has already become obvious to the professional community, and for the authorities and for society as a whole. It is no less important that these changes are possible, and while maintaining the achievements of the exam and the restoration of the lost advantages of traditional exams. It is only necessary to solve this, although the political, but the supra -party issue, resolve on the basis of the interests of people, country, education, science, and not on the basis of rather naive bureaucratic idealism and paper worship.

Boris Shalyutin