Eighteen thousand school undergraduates in Tatarstan write final essay for first time in five years

Some 18,000 school undergraduates in Tatarstan, along with peers in other Russian regions, today write the final essay required to be admitted for the 2015 unified state exam.

At 9:30 am, Federal Education and Science Oversight Service sent five essay themes for the examinees to choose from.

1. How could Mikhail Lermontov’s work be interesting for the contemporary reader?
2. “One who says war is not frightening knows nothing of war.” (Yulia Drunina)
3. The nature and human’s inner world: consonance and dissonance.
4. What events and impressions in life help a human to grow up?
5. What is more important, to love or be loved?

Individual sets of themes have been developed for each time zone and are at a certain time forwarded to Russian constituents’ regional processing centres via secure channels, to be published on regional websites 30 minutes before the essay writing.

The schoolchildren will write for about four hours, 235 minutes, while those with limited abilities will do by 1.5 hours longer.

The essays will be marked ‘pass’ or ‘fail’. The students who fail, graduates from previous years who fail to appear at the final essay or do not complete it for excusable reasons will be able to rewrite the essay between 4 February and 6 May.