Communists want to set Ukrainian education ten years back

In recent days tests of the Independent External Testing are the top issue for both high school graduates and for people working in the educational sphere in general. While the first get registered for IET-2013 (registration process started on January 4), others are actively discussing the statement made by Vice-Speaker Ihor Kalietnik about the need to cancel these tests. Communist Kalietnik said that, in order not to lose the quality of education, universities should go back to the practice of holding entrance exams. He spoke about 80 percent high school students dissatisfied with the tests without giving any information about the source of such facts and where he got them.

Director of the Ilko Kucheriv “Democratic Initiatives” Foundation Iryna Bekeshkina was surprised with the facts given by Kalietnik. According to the expert, surveys conducted by the Foundation indicate strong support of the IET among Ukrainian population and this figure is increasing every year. Bekeshkina considers it necessary to consolidate IET by law in order to put an end to talks about whether it is necessary or not. She expressed an opinion that abolition of IET aims at returning to corruption schemes. This opinion is shared by Lilia Hrynevych, head of the Parliamentary Committee on Science and Education.

In general, experts and specialist in education stress that there are no objective reasons and grounds for canceling testing and going back to the practice of holding entrance examination. However, they also caution that IET should not be considered perfect and progressive – at this point it still needs improvement and development. According to the director of the Center for Testing Technologies and Education Quality Monitoring Ihor Likarchuk, in this case there are no reasons to discuss such statements. “We have an opinion of one MP, who holds an elective office in the parliament and who simply expressed his point of view,” said Likarchuk in his comment for The Day. “I cannot make any predictions on whether the testing will be canceled or not, I can only say one thing for sure. If it happens, Ukrainian education will be set ten years back in its development, and that in situation when we do not have that much of a progress in this sphere because in the past 20 years there was no other reform in the educational system of Ukraine that would be equal in its effect to the introduction of the IET. Therefore, we should not cancel the IET now, but instead we should think about ways for its development so that those negative tendencies, which appeared in it, would not create an objective situation where we will have to get rid of it.”

Mr. Likarchuk also stressed that such talks are a sign of that the system needs to be developed and improved. He reminded that according to the survey conducted by Democratic Initiatives Foundation on IET, 44.8 percent of the respondents said that the main drawback is the imperfection of the tests, however, past year this figure was 31.3 percent. Also, nearly half of the respondents are concerned that there is no guarantee that the testing is held in a fair way in compliance with all procedures. Therefore, according to Likarchuk, we should develop the IET system at least in two aspects: the content and the technology of its implementation. “Today we use the same tests for all students. This means that high school graduate who is going to study at Department of English Philology takes the same test as a high school graduate who will apply to the Law Department. This is not right. The same applies to the tests in mathematics. Today it is the same for graduates of physics and mathematics schools, who studied math on a much more complicated program, and for those who will not have Math as major in the future. Here we should develop tests of different levels,” explained Likarchuk. The specialist also stressed that there should be tests of general academic competence. “This type of test has been tested long time ago but for some reason it was not made a part of the IET,” said Likarchuk. These are the aspects regarding the content. There are still a number of drawbacks regarding technology implementation.

“The technology for holding IET was introduced in 2006-07. In the years that have passed since then, a lot has changed. In particular, there appeared modern electronic tools for gathering information that are being used by our high school graduates. That is why we have to introduce changes and modify the procedure for the IET. It is also a real threat in the sense that if nothing is done, there will be an objective situation where testing will have to be cancelled,” Likarchuk summed up in his comment for The Day.