The fact that the ministry of education, together with the newly established knowledge test center, made the admission exam tests, which in fact were, politely said, wrong, and in reality illiterate, caused the sorrow of many people. It also caused their surprise. It’s not the first year that the exams of the Armenian language have been organized through tests. And it’s strange that our chinovniks succeeded in marring the joint exam system. Now we are facing a new threat. Next year, two more subjects are going to be tested jointly. However, in the aspect of contents, our higher education system is not ready for that. Till now I thought that only the humanitarian subjects’ tests have an illiterate and incorrect form. My friend, who’s a math professor at the university, offered me to take a look at the new math tests. He warned me that from time to time it would replace humor literature. This opinion is not exaggerated. Become assured yourselves. The two-volume math manual has a note saying, “approved by the Education reform center of the RA Ministry of Education, a manual anticipated for high class school students and future university applicants.” The book has the name of R.A. Avetisyan. He even wrote the prologs of the two volumes. But to say that he’s the author of the manual would be an exaggeration. This expert has just picked all kinds of tasks from school textbooks from the first to tenth classes and offers it to the pitiful applicants. I will just quote the problems in part and fully by only mentioning the data about the problems. The textbook of the sixth class, page 14: “the man and the woman together have 9 children, the man had 5 and the woman 7. How many of the children are of father and of the mother”. I think the solution of the problem will give “great knowledge” to the 6th class students. Textbook of the 6th class, page 201: “Harut had 7000 drams. He spent 2800 buying gasoline, lent 2500 to his friend and wanted to buy a book with the rest of the money, but there wasn’t enough money.” “If I had lent 100 drams less to my friend, I could have bought this book and still had some money,” thought Harut. What can you say about the price of the book? It’s good that the problem doesn’t require saying something about the contents of the book. You can imagine how great the contents of the book would be if Harut really could buy it. The 4th grade school student is supposed to solve this problem #582. “The problem requires to make alcohol and water, in which the water and the alcohol have the proportion 1 to 4. How many liters of alcohol and water must be used to make the mixture?” So that you don’t think that these are the only tricky problems in the manual, let me bring a few more examples. 9th class, problem#233: “from out of the 60 grams of 15% alcohol they took…”; problem#234, “from out of the 80 grams of 15% alcohol they took…” The strangest one is probably the task of the textbook of the 9th class, problem#254. “The man drinks one gallon of beer on his own within 14 days and with the woman within 10 days. During how many days will the woman drink the beer on her own?” By judging from the last example, perhaps our mathematicians don’t consider women as human beings. They think that the word “man” only means male. These concepts are fully in place in the minds of the authors of such books. It’s quite difficult to figure out if they really reformed the education system to come to such implications. The final certificate given to school graduates is totally unprecedented. It can be compared to some rural laundry or the current architecture of downtown Yerevan. It’s very hard to figure out the school certificates because the grades are demonstrated in the scale system. Over twenty subjects are graded that way. And the scale of the grading of the graduation tests reminds of the above-mentioned laundry. The tests of the Armenian language, botany, and math are graded by the 20-point scale system. The tests of Armenian history, physical training and foreign languages are graded by the 5-point system. These changes have been done in the process of joining the Bologna movement. Judging by the self-advertising of our chinovniks, who make statements with serious faces, we may assume that they know what they’re doing. They know but don’t let the society know. And the society didn’t understand why the third class pupils would skip a year and the next year study in the 5th. The final goal of this system is the transition to the 12-year education system. Besides this, it’s hard to believe that the ministry will succeed to print new textbooks. Therefore, next year the students will go to school to study with a certain class, but in reality will be in a lower grade. There is really no sense to make financial expenditures to change the covers of the textbooks, since the contents are not going to be changed anyway. And it won’t change for a long time. The textbooks usually say first edition or second or third. As a result even after the process of being checked and verified, the textbooks remain illiterate. Therefore in film director Woody Allen style, “The garbage is not thrown away in Armenia, it is refined in textbooks.”
