Good God, donāt tell me that they are also being used for carbon offsets O_o
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Possibly. I donāt know. I never thought of that angle before.
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I think itās a pastime of the present, or even of the future. 
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Long time ago, like 10-20 years ago, our country decided to introduce unified exam at the end of the school and the scores then would be used to enter universities.
Before that the system was simple. You passed your school exams (they didnāt matter). And then to enter any university/college you passed the exams and trials of that specific university. The universities thus could tailor exams for their specifics and expected knowledge level.
We decided to have a unified more or less objective standardized exam system.
A separate exam for each subject, as you would expect. Single choice questions, multiple choice questions and then questions with written out answer. Of course itās public knowledge what kinds of questions are there but the specific questions for the exam are held in secret until the d day. And the whole country writes the same (well, multiple variants of the same) exam simultaneously*.
You write the exam in a different school than you studied in to prevent any favoritism. Test parts are checked automatically, I think. And written out answers are anonymized and checked by random teachers. And there was even a system that the same paper is checked by different teachers and if the mark is too different then a third teacher needs to check it as well and give the final mark.
You could still cheat but as far as our country is concerned thatās the best we could do.
And with these exam scores you can seek to enter any university in the country. The universities are obligated to accept people in the order of the scores and have public lists of candidates.
Thereās a downside that any cheating wonāt be localized to one place but have federal consequences but still. It allowed many smart kids to go to top universities.
I donāt know what came out of it now, when it was new it was pretty fair. Nowadays probably it degenerated (together with everything else) but ~10 years ago it was good.
And everyone hated it.
Turned out that a lot of schoolers donāt know most basic things. Before schools just pushed them through local exams somehow to look good and who cares what happens after that. Now we have objective-ish stats and the country looks bad. Schools look bad. Parents and children are stressed that they need to show some actual knowledge. Many parents had to deal with an unfortunate surprise that their children arenāt that smart. Universities now donāt get to choose whom they take. Before they had plenty of room for corruption and favoritism (for various reasons) and now their choice is forced by law. Parents in big cities (where the top universities are) are mad that the places they felt entitled to got taken by some intelligent peasants from who knows where.
Ironic that one of the good reforms (a rarity these days) was hated so much. Official opposition often ran on canceling this system and returning to old ways. A lot of people feel more comfortable with hush-hush corrupt āI have a friend of a friendā way of doing things.
By the way, I remember in my (much better than average) class people complained that the problems on the exam werenāt completely similar to the ones in practice so one needed to exercise their brain a little bit to apply the same principles in a different situation. And thatās not fair.
*I put an asterisk at āsimultaneouslyā there because to the surprise of our bigheads it turned out that timezones exist. It was simultaneous relative to local time but in reality people in earlier timezones published photos of the questions before exam started in later timezones. And because questions were the same you could cheat a little bit but later it was fixed.
I also experienced the praised old system and it was dumb. Nothing good about it.
I hear that it appears similar to Greece one needs supplementary lessons to get good scores nowadays. Parents say that itās impossible otherwise. And I mean itās not true thereās plenty of free information. But preparing on your own is not something to be expected from average school children. They donāt understand yet how to do it. So parents have to rely on someone to put the knowledge into the heads.
Another interesting detail is that math exam (I think itās just math) had to be divided into basic and advanced exams. I guess because in order to sort smarter (technically-minded) children you need advanced stuff in there but then that exam becomes way too difficult for regular (art-minded) children. But that was already way after my trials, so Iām not up to date on any of that.
Maybe JethOrensin will appreciate this wall of text.
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Quite so. 
Our system has two differences, one major, one minor.
The minor one is that we shuffle the teachers to different schools when the testing time comes, instead of the students for two reasons. A) They are adults, they can more easier and they are fewer than the students and B) They usually have no reason to help the students of the next school look good, so they are not helping anyone.
The major difference is that once the tests are done and graded, you get a final sum of grades. With that sum you go and declare a number of universities you would like to apply. Then the system gets the lists of each student and goes:
University X has 100 empty spaces, who was the highest ranking student that declared this university as first choice. That student gets in ā¦ and so forth till the seats all fill up. The grade of the lowest passing student is called that universityās ābaseā. It is oddly well organised, though, of course, if your grade is near last yearās base you spend a few weeks twiddling your thumbs hoping that the base goes a bit up or down this year.
In my case I had 16996 points and the base of my department ended up being 16992 points. So, I got in by a margin of difference of 4 points in 20000 (which is the full points). Just imagine how many lives (not only my own - Iāve met hundreds if not thousands of people since then) would have changed if a couple more people had declared that university.
It is funny how life can be like that some times
The usual thing that people and parents say to students is that those exams are not ālife-changingā, but that is easily among one of the biggest lies parents and teachers will ever tell in their lives.
The problem is that they do not seem to understand that universities are where they should spread their intellectual wings and test if they can fly. But having been setup in school to RECEIVE the answers from teachers/parents/tutors, the kids find it very hard to veer away from that and start thinking beyond the need of tutoring 
Back when I was a university student (2002-2006) there were not many internet resources and things werenāt really organised in finding any external help, so you had to struggle to stay afloat and try things on your own.
Today a kid can get on the internet, google it a bit and they can find organised companies that will make the exercises for them, prep them for tests and tutor them, obviously for a price. There are companies that sell even the service of writting your thesis, even for a doctorate 
Look at this: ĪĻĪ³Ī±ĻĪÆĪµĻ | STUDYHELP
I mean, thatās just sad ā¦ 
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I omitted the details since they couldāve changed already. The way it worked is like this. Everyone are required to take math and the language. Since itās considered that everyone needs to know how to count and write properly. The rest youāre free to take or not to take. Mostly people took two or three subjects theyāre good at.
And in university they look at sum of three (maybe somewhere more, idk) scores: required math and language plus one subject thatās matches the nature of this specific education program. Like nuclear physics would require physics, information security - whatās called informatics.
A candidate can apply to at most five (?) universities and three (?) programs in each but only one program in one university is first choice (as the lists are published and updated you can change your first choice as your expectations change). Once deadline passes some number of people is passed among those who chose that specific program in that specific university as first choice. Of course it may be that your first choice in a very good university didnāt hit but you werenāt passed in ok university either because it wasnāt first choice. So thereās a second wave where people adjust their expectations. Itās a bit confusing honestly and perhaps these waves donāt work quite like that. Cause I entered with my first choice with healthy leeway I didnāt need to pay attention. But was that the right choice?
Thatās a lot of points. Where do these come from? We have 100 points per exam. And is there any sense in dividing it so finely?
I think over here we instead heard mostly that these decide your future path so you better hecking study.
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Minecraft has become self-hosting
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That happens a lot more than people think, actually ā¦ in my department there were a couple of people that scored high and finished the four year curriculum at four years and high grades, but the rest of us that did manage to complete it in four years were, comparatively the dregs of the national exam. A lot of high profile students didnāt perform well in university for various reasons ( e.g. burnout, still thought they were in highschool, couldnāt adapt, disillussioned with their choice, lack of actual urgency - a.k.a. their families had moneeeey 
- thought that they could live the āuni-student lifeā first and so on ) and generally out of the 140 people that were admitted in my year, only 20 of us really attended every lab and class. It is not easy to choose correctly when you are 18, which is one of the major problems of any such system ā¦ Especially pre-internet where you couldnāt check the curriculum ā¦ I remember how shocked almost everyone was at the amount of math and physics in my department. Things, at least, are more transparent now, and you can know where you are getting involved in.
The school grades are from 0-20, so to add nuance to it, instead of going with decimals (which might be confusing to a lot of parent), they just multiply the final sum of the grades (modifiers included) with 1000.
Yes, there is sense to is, because as I said I got in for just 4 points in 20000 and I was not even the last one to be admitted. I think there were other six people below me, so even one point matters. Think how lucky the people that are the actual base (last to be admitted) feel.
Good God! that was so impressive O_o
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The article is kinda annoyingly written. Almost as if to match the popular narrative in the West of women (or other minorities) fighting back and refusing to be silent and so on. I think the article doesnāt give enough perspective on how screwed everything is. At the very least have a paragraph or two about how often this happens, how often these internal investigations amount to anything.
And protesters so the enemies of the state, Iād say thatās encouraged if anything.
By the way, seen recent pictures of Navalny?
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God save the king
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Another indication that 2022 is especially rough. But itās gonna get way worse.
āthe king is dead, long live the kingāā¦
Ya know, for some weird reason i thought she would outlive meā¦ Oh well
We at least all hoped she would outlive her son so William could take over straight away.
God save the King. 
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I donāt know if itās just factual or snark that all news outlets mention how heās the oldest heir apparent ever.
And how she died surrounded by all the people she lovedā¦ And Harry was late.
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