In 2014 the future college applicants failed to show not even a high, but a satisfactory level of knowledge of foreign languages – only 0,11% managed to get a successful score.
This was stated during a press conference by the director of the Ukrainian Centre of Education Quality Evaluations Igor Likarchuk, cited by “Osvita.”
According to him, to successfully pass the EIE test in the English language, which was taken by over 69 thousand college applicants, it was necessary to receive a score of 56 test points.
“Only 87 people in all of Ukraine, or 0,11% from the overall number of those who took this test, got 56 points,” notified the director of the UCEQE, noting that these data do not account for Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts.
“This is very little. And according to all psychometric measures the test was below the average difficulty level. This was not a difficult test,” emphasised Likarchuk.
According to the director of the UCEQE, the test contained 1500 words and its difficulty cannot be compared with international standards such as the TOEFL and others.
Also Igor Likarchuk stated that 11 thousand or one our of seven participants of the EIE in English failed to answer 10 questions on the test.
Almost 100 people failed to answer all of the questions.
“The situation is even worse with the part we call sheet “B,” where the applicant is supposed to write a letter in the foreign language. 25% of the applicants that took the English language text did not write anything at all. Only 3200 participants out of 69 thousand got 14 maximum points for this task,” said the UCEQE director.
“Just imagine how many specialised school, gymnasiums, lyceum, schools with enhanced education we have, in general schools where English is taught, and this is the result we get,” noted Likarchuk.
He also stated that none of the graduates from village schools received the highest result. According to him, this means that village schools basically do not produce a high level of knowledge in foreign languages.
Also the director of the UCEQE noted that the EIE results of college applicants in other foreign languages, in particular, German, French and Spanish, are even worse.
“The previous leadership of the Education and Science Ministry talked a lot about the reform of foreign language education. They implemented foreign language study starting the second grade, of the second foreign language – starting the fifth. There have been no reforms,” noted the UCEQE director.
“We cannot provide the teaching of even one foreign language at a sufficient level, and are being too ambitious by trying to implement the teaching of two and three foreign languages,” noted the director of the Ukrainian Centre for Education Quality Evaluations, after analysing the results of the test in foreign languages.
Source: pravda
Translated by Mariya Shcherbinina
