External Independent Testing Of Ukrainian School Graduates Has Been Accomplished
article prepared by Marina Pristinskaya

This year over 460,000 graduates of Ukrainian schools  participated in an independent testing of knowledge in April-May, 2008. The system of independent testing,which is practiced in more than 150 countries all over the world, is being implemented in Ukraine.

The goal of this project is to stop or at least reduce the corruption in Ukrainian educational system, due to which the children will have equal chances to enter colleges and uiniversities, based only on the level of knowledge. Under the present system of administering entrance exams, quite often the applicants are inclined to bribe school administrations to obtain better high school recored or to be admitted to higher educational institutions. The new proposed system is intended to make the grading of entrance exams anonymous, and to fight this corrupt practice.

Each applicant recieves the result of the testing in a special envelope. An envelope can be unwrapped only by its owner. The decision to pronounce about the results of testing is individual. The participants of the international competitions and winners of Ukrainian national competitions are permitted to enter the High Educational Establishments only with the short personal interviews at universities, and without having to pass entrance exams.

School graduates select the subjects to take at independent testing, based on their individual goals and on the subjects which they will need to study in the higher educational establishments. The certificate of independent testing results has to be submitted along with other application papers to the Higher Educational Institution, according to the standard requirements.

The independent tests were held in ten high-school subjects for the 2008 high school graduates; the materials of the tests were translated into the languages of national minorities - Russian, Hungarian and Moldovian.

Our worker interviewed one of the Kharkov’s high school teachers about the testing. She made the following comments about implementation of the new system:

"An external independent testing is a good way for the talented and diligent children to entry the desired University in spite of the study fee and good connections with authoritative people. I know many examples when a choice of University is based only on the parents' decision, rather than on an individual goal or talent of a child. It seems that now the situation will slowly turn different. All students will have equal chances. The concept seems very simple:  Better knowledge - higher grades!

Some mistakes have already been found in the process of introduction of the new system. The bigest difficulty for the graduates of this year is that it is all so new and unusual to them. It would be much easier for them to go through testing, if they had similar practices in previous years of school, since the primary school. The system of testing should be implemented from the first classes and the idea of an external independent testing has to be clear for everyone who works and studies at school."