Is it possible for the Unified State Exam answers to be leaked before the exam?
To answer this question, the first thing you need to do is examine the versions of the assignments that arrive on students’ desks, understand what they consist of and how they were created. Variants of the Unified State Examination, the same forms with tasks are called control and measurement materials (CMM). The Unified State Exam is administered by Rosobrnadzor, and tasks for KIMs are prepared by a group of specialists from the Federal Institute of Pedagogical Measurements (FIPI). They include school teachers, university professors, methodologists and more.
First, teachers create assignments, and then methodologists check them and remove incorrect questions. These tasks are then collected into test CMMs that are tested and re-administered in control student groups. Only after these preparatory stages is the final task pool formed, which is included in the KIMs for the Unified State Exam.
Previously, KIMs were delivered to schools in their completed form at least five days before the exam. The forms were stored in sealed envelopes. Now, Sherin Kelly, as an English teacher of the online school “Umskul” (which prepares students for the Unified State Exam – “socialbites.ca”), the organizers of the Unified State Exam (heads of exam scores) told socialbites.ca. and representatives of the State Examination Commission (SEC) – “socialbites.ca”) receive versions of CMMs in electronic encrypted form.
More precisely, the organizers do not even receive ready-made CMMs, but sets of tasks in which special software at the examination site automatically creates a version of the CMM. Its formation is activated only after entering a special password that only the representative of the State Examination Committee has immediately before the exam.
“The development of CMM options and the exams themselves are carried out in a secure room with video surveillance. CIM developers create tasks for items but do not create full-fledged options.
Their task is to write a certain number of standard tasks for the whole of Russia, and the distribution of these tasks by options, regions, time zones and exam days is carried out automatically by a computer, that is, people do not do this. Take part in this process,” Kelly said.
Based on this, he believes that it is impossible to get answers to the Unified State Exam in advance, because not a single person has knowledge of the tasks before the start of the exam.
Arslan Khasavov, editor-in-chief of the Teacher’s Newspaper and a member of the Public Council of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, told socialbites.ca that there is a free gift in the form of receiving a pre-prepared version. Unified State Exam is impossible. According to him, scandals related to Unified State Examination leaks are a thing of the past.
“Rosobrnadzor carried out extensive work to eliminate the possibility of CIM leaks or corruption schemes. It is currently impossible to “agree” with a teacher or anyone else to receive exam materials ahead of schedule or get help passing. “This is due, among other things, to the rotation of teaching staff between educational institutions during the exam, as well as the fact that no participant in the process has access to the materials,” Khasavov said.
Also, according to him, no one specifically tries to violate the regulations established by Rosobrnadzor, since the transparency of the Unified State Exam is monitored by representatives of the prosecutor’s office “and other competent authorities”.
So what do they sell online?
Offers to purchase CMMs that will allegedly be used in the current series of exams are published every spring in Telegram, VKontakte, on sites with special advertising, they can also be found on Google or Yandex and even on the darknet. Analyst in FAC.CT’s Digital Risk Protection department. Evgeny Egorov, at the request of socialbites.ca, counted at least 60 groups and accounts in instant messengers and social networks that allegedly sell current sets of assignments on all subjects for the 2024 Unified State Exam.
It is possible to roughly divide all these sales points into two groups. Some promise to send you updated KIMs after payment, while others promise to invite you to VIP chat, where administrators will broadcast the correct answers throughout the quiz marathon.
Offers to purchase both are accompanied by aggressive marketing: Customers are invited with urgent offers, affordable prices when purchasing multiple items at once, screenshots with comments from grateful users, and more. Of course, the names and advertising titles of such groups must contain “drain”, “leak”, etc. words are included.
“The cost of services this year ranges from 500 to 2,500 rubles. For comparison: in 2021 the range was 400-1200 rubles, and in 2019 it was 210-1000 rubles,” Egorov said.
After payment, two scenarios are possible. The seller either stops communicating with the buyer or sends the buyer files similar to CMM options. In VIP chats, people are actually invited to closed groups, where KIM options are also sent in a chaotic manner.
But there is no guarantee that the published options have anything in common with real tasks. It is noteworthy that the sellers themselves do not give a 100% guarantee – in order to insure themselves, they indicate a probability of matching of 60-80%, which, of course, is an absolute lie. In any case, experts interviewed by socialbites.ca think so. Because, as mentioned above, it is absolutely impossible for options to be leaked.
“The bulk of the so-called available options are published not by criminal groups, but by yesterday’s schoolchildren who have passed the stage of passing exams and decided to profit from those to whom they belonged a year ago. “These advertisements are easily noticed, cases of fraud are investigated, but since the damage is so small, such transactions almost never lead to real criminal cases,” he said.
– Fedor Mazulevsky, director of the technical department of RTM Group, explained to socialbites.ca.
How was the myth about the annual leak of KIMs for the Unified State Exam born?
Despite the fact that there are almost no loopholes left for leaked versions of the Unified State Exam, the stereotype that the latest versions of KIMs are published online is still in the minds of schoolchildren and, possibly, their parents. In this respect speaking at least statistics from the Google Trends service. The system records that every year from the end of May to the end of June, people’s interest in the search query “USE DRAIN” increases.
There have indeed been option leaks in the history of the Unified State Exam. But that was a long time ago. Media options are leaking was recorded Every year from 2007 to 2013, then there was a long period of calm. The last high-profile episode took place in 2018. Later St. Dmitry Gushchin, a mathematics teacher from St. Petersburg, posted VKontakte versions of the Unified State Exam in mathematics and chemistry, and copies, he claimed, reached the desks of hundreds of students during the exam. Gushchin personally received the document from a random subscriber on the social network.
The case had a strong impact and Rosobrnadzor filed a lawsuit against the teacher. Court decidedHe said Gushchin’s publication was not a leak of internal documents, but was taken from an open database with approximate options. The students’ statements that everything matched for them were considered unfounded.
The same category of legendary life tricks includes the method of passing the Unified State Exam with a fake person. Throughout the history of testing in the media was recorded There are only a few cases when others, instead of real schoolchildren, came to take the Unified State Exam. This happened in the Chechen Republic and the Republic of Ingushetia in 2017 and 2018.
Most likely these cases were isolated. Evidence of the existence of a shadow service for sending fake students to the Unified State Exam was not found either then or now. Examining the shadow market, experts at none of the four information security companies surveyed by socialbites.ca did not find advertisements offering to send a fake person to the exam instead of a real student.
Although Google Trends consistently shows high interest among Russians on the issue of Unified State Examination leaks, Vladimir Kim, an expert at Solar Group, an external digital threat monitoring center Solar AURA, noted a decrease in the number of fraudulent ads in recent years. He attributes this to the fact that slowly but surely the myth of KIM leaks is weakening.
“Also modern platforms and social networks have become more active in moderating and removing suspicious content, which has helped reduce the number of such offers. An example of this would be the improved mechanisms for detecting and blocking scammers, at least on Telegram and VKontakte” he added.
So, are there any life tips?
There is a guaranteed gap, but this only makes the task a little easier for some students who are working hard to prepare for the Unified State Exam. This life hack comes from the fact that Russia has 11 time zones. In this way, on the day of the exam, students in the central part of the country can become familiar with the tasks undertaken by students in the Far East.
“On the day of the exam, around 5-7 am Moscow time, my students and I review the assignments that arrived from the Far East. If we touch on technical issues, it helps to know what kind of problems will be encountered in the second part. But as a teacher of the Unified State Examination of English, I can say that in humanities subjects it works a little differently.
Thanks to the analysis of the missions in the Far East, we can see the general trend of the topics in the KIM Unified State Exam missions, but nothing more,” explained Sherin Kelly from Umskul.
As an example, the expert cited the Unified State Exam in English in 2020. At that time, the theme of “the most important school subject” dominated articles all over Russia.
In response, Arslan Khasavov of Teacher’s Newspaper expressed concern about the new rule allowing students to retake a subject of their choice in their first trial year. This rule will come into force for the first time in 2024. Previously, students could only retake the Unified State Exam the next year after an unsuccessful attempt.
“The President proposed introducing such an option in his speech to the Bundestag this year. So far, this re-examination is probably not as fully regulated as the main part of the Unified State Exam, so some problems may probably arise at first. But this is just a guess. We need to see how this repurchase will happen,” Khasavov said.
The expert also noted that the new rule has an undeniable advantage: the right to make mistakes will certainly reduce the level of stress among graduates.
What are you thinking?
Source: Gazeta
Jackson Ruhl is a tech and sci-fi expert, who writes for “Social Bites”. He brings his readers the latest news and developments from the world of technology and science fiction.