Marina Yardaeva Why are there so many exams in schools? 04/11/2024, 08:05

The last quarter has started in schools. It seems to be the shortest, with lots of days off, but also the hardest. The results are summarized; This means two months of continuous control work. Then the president came out and called for reducing the number of these very controlling ones. Many froze in surprise. Isn’t it a joke? Almost no one believes this is possible anymore. Schools were filled with screening, cross-sectional, diagnostic studies, and endless testing. And there’s no end in sight.

Why did this happen? There are many reasons. Weird programs that are not designed for slow learning and constant repetition. Strange attempts by officials who do not feed themselves – let them check and measure things in schools. Strange pedagogical scenarios where homework analysis, exams, group work and discussions are replaced by independent work throughout the entire course. Each reason can be analyzed separately for a long time.

For example, there are training programs here. Many of them are compiled according to the principle “Every lesson is a new topic.” From where? Learning is constant repetition. Explaining something does not mean mentioning something once and moving on. To explain is to show how patterns work using hundreds of different examples. In detail, step by step.

The luxury of honing a skill over a long period of time has disappeared today, even in Russian and mathematics classes, where traditionally the most hours were devoted. Open any textbook; It will be a kaleidoscope of different, often unrelated topics. In the fifth grade, three to four hours are given for the study of alternating roots (more than two dozen types), for complex sentences – several lessons, but in between them there are all sorts of nonsense, like studying ways to connect. Sentences in a text or sentences that even language professors cannot agree on their unity in word formation analysis.

What can we say about disciplines that devote 1-2 hours a week? Take biology. From 5th to 7th grades, 34 lessons are allocated per year. Let’s open the textbooks: each contains about 30 paragraphs. At the same time, some lessons will be lost due to the holidays, and some will be spent on the notorious exams. It turns out that you either need to teach two subjects per lesson at once, or leave some of them for independent study. And you still need to somehow make sure that the material is mastered. What is the easiest way to do this with maximum scope and limited time? The first thing that comes to my mind is a trial run. But as a result it turned out that the majority did not master the material – miracles do not happen. But this is already a problem for schoolchildren – they should have read the textbook more carefully.

It is clear that sensible teachers are trying to optimize something on their own, completely skipping strange topics, abandoning tests for the entire lesson for the sake of five-minute tests and preliminary surveys and disabling extracurricular activities for hours. However, the room for maneuver is decreasing every year. But still, officials always want something.

Bureaucratic initiatives from above are a separate story and surprising – a mixture of arias and songs. Today schools are forced to conduct many federal tests: VPR, RDR, DKR, EKR, PISA, OGE training and the Unified State Exam. It all sounds very serious and even scary, which apparently pleases the authorities very much. On the field, everything often turns into some kind of crude joke. Then the children will en masse write everything as D, and in schools they think about how they can reflect this fact more creatively in their reports so that it is not too noticeable. On the contrary, schoolchildren will en masse steal everything from the internet and school administrations will have to explain themselves to get straight A’s because it won’t happen. In addition, the tasks on federal exams may not correspond to the programs of specific educational institutions, because schools have never switched to the promised unified program, because the state has never created the conditions for this.

If this program were unified, the possibilities of cheating would be eliminated (and the answers on the VPR day would be combined in an organized way), the articles would be compiled more thoughtfully (if the question is wrong, there are errors), then diagnosis would be possible according to a single federal standard, I would like to limit myself. But even if this is not the case, schools are forced to conduct their own internal controls and endure initiatives from above as a necessary evil.

And evil often triumphs by replicating itself. For example, when the Unified State Exam is approaching, no one can explain the meaning of taking exams in the 11th grade.

And the saddest thing is that some teachers are so accustomed to the established nonsense that they stop noticing it. Moreover, they reproduce this strange control system in their lessons for the sake of control. Moreover, according to the given templates. They download the demo version of VPR, print it for the whole class – and now the children are busy for 45 minutes and the next column in the magazine is guaranteed to be filled with new notes. It doesn’t matter which ones. And this is very sad.

Of course something needs to be done. However, measures do not need to be taken only at the order level. What is the point of ordering the reduction of exams and not canceling even half of the Ministry of Education’s proposals? This is, you know, like the May decrees in which the president announced that teachers’ salaries should not be below the regional average. They still haven’t given the money, but they have started to adjust the numbers by increasing the workload and charging teachers 1.5-2 times the salary. And they can get rid of this with tests: they will call them independent, practical, but the essence will remain the same.

So yes, half of VPR, RDR and other ECRs need to be deleted from the list of mandatory ones and from all plans. It is also worth noting that many local people will carry these out on their own initiative due to inertia. Do not analyze only individual tasks from the VPR, OGE and old versions of the Unified State Exam (there is nothing bad in this, you can also create useful exercises based on the tasks of open banks), but give them independently throughout the entire lesson. completion for evaluation. This also needs to be addressed. I don’t know, maybe we should instruct school entities to monitor and analyze this according to self-management principles. Control should also be established to reduce control tests in general. Sorry for the pun.

The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the position of the editors.