KHABAROVSK, August 21 (Itar-Tass) — Minister of Education and Science Andrei Fursenko commented on Sunday in Khabarovsk on consequences of introducing the Unified State Examination (EGE). “The new system has more positive than negative elements,” he told reporters at a meeting.
According to the minister, “thanks to the EGE, graduates now have no need to take examinations again while entering a higher school”. While in the past, “the school leaver had only one chance a year to join a higher school in a specific place of passing exams; school graduates now take examinations where they live, send results of their examinations to various higher schools and cities and wait for which higher school is ready to take them”.
In a word, “the choice was for higher schools in the past, while graduates had no rights in a sense”. “The situation has changed now: a higher school chooses students and students choose a higher school,” the minister stated.
Second, Fursenko continued, under the EGE system, “it is impossible ‘to muzzle’ blatantly and purposefully an entree to a higher school”. It’s also important that the EGE system has similar requirements all over the country. Besides, the subjective factor “eclipses” when much depends on sympathy or antipathy of an examiner.
All violations under the new system “are laid bare easily no matter how strange it sounds,” he underlined.
Examining negative sides of the EGE system, the minister noted: “There is more formalism and loss of individuality”. “There are people for whom it is psychologically easier to take exams orally,” Fursenko continued.
Describing the development of the education system in Russia, its funding and technical equipment, he said: “The consolidated budget of education was under 800 billion rubles back in 2004, now it tops two trillion rubles and grows further, despite all problems.” Some deceleration of growth rates in financing is caused in the recent past with objective actualities of life: a rise in funds on pensions, public health and defense.
During his two-day visit to Khabarovsk, Fursenko participated in a meeting of the territory’s teachers, a conference on legislative provision of the education system under modernization conditions. The minister visited the Khabarovsk technical college and a health-building complex of Pacific State University. The university presented the territorial programme for developing professional education in 2011-2013 at a meeting on issues of professional training.