In Ukraine, the DPA for schoolchildren is canceled for the 4th year in a row: why is this (not) a problem

In Ukraine, for the fourth year in a row, the state final certification for the 4th, 9th, and 11th grades is canceled. Some consider this decision acceptable in the conditions of martial law, because over the last year, education has become a challenge for many schoolchildren. However, there are those who are categorically against the abolition of DPA. In particular, Yehor Stadny, the first vice-rector of the Kyiv School of Economics and former deputy minister of education in 2019-2020, believes that DPA is one of the assessment formats that in the future can help identify clear gaps in students’ knowledge. Especially, taking into account the problems that Ukrainian schoolchildren have faced at least in recent years due to the pandemic and the war. “The question is not even about canceling the DPA. The question is about the consensus that has been simmering in society for a long time, and now it has finally matured. Conditionally it sounds like this: school education has a number of problems, so there is no need to make final certifications and other measurements. Over the past three years, more additional arguments: the children studied remotely, the children did not study, the children are under stress, the school was bombed, the teachers moved, etc.,” Stadny emphasized in a comment to “UP. Life”. Photo: Wavebreakmedia/Depositphotos In addition, the absolute majority of schoolchildren, parents, teachers and educational officials themselves do not want to receive disappointing results of knowledge measurements, he believes. “There is a belief that the DPA will not change anything. And it is really hard to believe, especially looking at the last years of Ukrainian education. But in fact, qualitative changes can only begin with one thing – measurements and the definition of clear problems based on these measurements. Of course, it is by no means a sufficient condition for changes, because these results can simply be hidden under a cloth, but it is necessary, it is a beginning,” adds the first vice-rector of KSE. The next step to improving the quality of students’ knowledge assessment, according to Stadnyi, is a public discussion about how to achieve the desired level of knowledge assessment in order to be able, in particular, to compensate for educational losses. “On the contrary, today we look like a patient who does not allow tests to be carried out so that doctors can prescribe and start a course of treatment. The patient can also be understood, he was often deceived by doctors. But the patient will definitely not get better like this,” Yehor Stadny noted. The co-founder of the “Smart Education” public organization, Ivanna Kobernyk, has a different opinion. At least regarding DPA for 4th and 9th grades. In her opinion, the cancellation of DPA for students “does not pose any problems” because it is not a standardized test. “It was an ordinary test, which was made by the school’s teachers themselves. Accordingly, there was no basis for measuring the level of knowledge in the country,” Kobernyk stressed. At the same time, Kobernyk considers the DPA for 11th grades important for understanding the quality of school education, but such data will not be available for the fourth year in a row. In general, the co-founder of the NGO “Smart Education” supports the abolition of DPA in order to reduce “tension between children and parents”. However, he admits that the problem of measuring the level of knowledge and educational losses by methods that would not affect the final grades of children still remains unsolved. “This is the only way to get real data. No one is doing this and it’s a problem,” Kobernyk emphasizes. By the way, educational losses, according to the Education Sector of the World Bank, can amount to more than one year in Ukraine. Read also: “The threshold of 10% is a sanitary minimum”: what is wrong with the evaluation of the NMT-2023 At the same time, a member of the board of the Ministry of Education and Culture, Nikita Andreev, believes that the DPA in the form in which it was conducted “is not an adequate way of measuring knowledge and attestation students”. Therefore, canceling the tests “does not carry any significant risks.” “The main purpose of the DPA is to compare the learning outcomes of the students (what we actually have) and the requirements of the state standards of general secondary education (what we would like to have). Very often the results are simply “drawn”. The DPA for 4th grade is for me in general a mystery. Can someone not pass the DPA and not be accepted until grade 5, if we have secondary education as mandatory? DPA after the 9th grade could be appropriate if the process of conducting it was sharpened to reveal real results (without the possibility to change them) “, Andreev believes. According to a member of the board of the Ministry of Education, the DPA for assessing the knowledge of 11th-grade students can be replaced by the external examination. According to him, the DPA does not allow to adequately assess the compliance of educational outcomes of students with the requirements of state standards of general secondary education, and is also not a source of information for making management decisions aimed at improving the quality of education. In addition, conducting DPA requires significant resources for the organization, but rarely affects the further educational trajectory of the applicants. “I believe that DPA as an institution should be reorganized (at the stage of the 4th and 9th grade), and after the end of the general secondary education institution, it should be fully automated or simply replaced with a compulsory external examination for all graduates,” – said Nikita Andreev. We will remind you that this year, just like last year, graduates will take a three-subject multi-subject test for admission to the university. In 2023, the testing format was refined, giving applicants a choice of which subjects to take third. In addition, the test organizers changed the technical characteristics of the NMT and the evaluation format. The latter caused a lot of dissatisfaction among experts. You can read more about this in the article: “The threshold of 10% is a sanitary minimum”: what is wrong with the assessment of NMT-2023



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