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Russian Language as a Pass to the World

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Russian Language as a Pass to the World

01.09.2014

Why were the rules of admission to the Unified States Exam changed on the Day of Knowledge?
 
Starting on September 1, the beginning of the new school year, a written composition again became compulsory for admission to the Russian Language USE (Unified State Examination). In 2009 the graduation composition was cancelled after switching to the compulsory USE. However, the deteriorating knowledge of Russian, exposed at the last USE exam made the RF Ministry of Education and Science revise their decision: the composition has returned.

Now all high-school graduates will write a composition in December as a stage of preparing for the USE. Based on its results, high school students will either be admitted or not admitted to the USE. Eleventh-grade students will write it at their schools while their works will be checked by invited teachers and independent experts who will choose between two marks: Pass or Fail. Those who may wish to get a score for their composition, to be qualified for entering a university where the composition is a major, will have the right to points.

Earlier – in the middle of school year – writing a composition gives more than one chance: both in February and March those who are not satisfied with the result or will want to improve the writing score will be given another chance. The points (only the best score) for the composition will be considered at the time of application to a university. True, these are just preliminary conditions and the methodology of composition grading will be refined by October 1 along with the examination procedure.

The fact that the topics for the final exam of 2015 are already known is another demonstration of reformers’ earnestness. There are five topics: “There’s a reason all of Russia remembers” after the works of Mikhail Lermontov; “Questions which war poises to mankind”; “The inter-generation debate: together and apart” after the works of Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, Soviet and Russian writers; “What people live by” (Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Alexander Pushkin, Anton Chekhov) and “Man and nature in Russian and world fiction”. All topics have been elaborated and discussed by the composition board under the Education Ministry, chaired by Natalia Solzhenitsyn.

The USE will also be radically revised. Multiple-choice tests, once the main part of the exam, will be excluded as such. Or rather, their exclusion from the state examination system will be stepwise. For now the number of such tests will be halved and by 2016 they will be cut by two thirds. As has already been done on other subjects: mathematics and literature – and for the same reason: the USE should be about thinking, analyzing and generalizing rather than guessing. It is for this reason that the guesswork part of the exam – multiple-choice tests – will gradually shrink to one third of its present volume. Teachers, linguists and officials from the Russian Education Oversight Committee came to this conclusion long ago, but the results of 2013-2014 demonstrated that it is dangerous to further delay the USE reformatting.

The problem is that despite the toughening of USE conditions by the RF Ministry of Education and Science that for the first time introduced video surveillance and metal detectors at the entrance to auditoriums on the pretext of transparency, safety and equal opportunity (pushing the USE cost to 1.2 billion rubles compared to 312 million rubles in 2013), the results were frustrating. The average score on the Russian exam declined 1.5% in comparison with 2013, which is too much, according to experts, so that the lowest possible mark on Russian had to be reduced by 12 points, or nearly 20% of Russian schoolchildren could have ended up with “unsatisfactory” scores. The lowest possible mark on mathematics was lowered by 7 points.

The steady deterioration of USE results demonstrates the state of secondary education in the country. Pursuant to the rules of the National Final Attestation, a student who fails to get over the minimum threshold on compulsory USE subjects, Russian and mathematics, won’t get a high school diploma and will lose the chance to enter a tertiary educational institution that year. 

“The analysis of the USE concerns us,” says Oksana Reshetnikova, director of the Federal Institute of Pedagogical measurements. “The results of 2013 necessitate a review of the methods of teaching Russian and the USE procedure. It is for this reason that a working group was formed under the Ministry of Education to refine the teaching of different subjects, including the Russian language.”

“As was corroborated by the Russian Education Oversight Committee, the newly formed Council for Russian Language under the Russian Government was recently involved in work on refining the methods of teaching Russian,” Reshetnikova says. “One of our recommendations to renew the methods of teaching Russian reads: “It is necessary to give better knowledge to our youth about historical, cultural and natural riches of Russia and to take into account the context of changing times – internet technologies, foreign borrowings developing Russian, the game methods of teaching, especially at the initial stages.” 

Anna Loshchikhina
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