How to take Russian if you are a techie. Stobalnik on preparation for the USE-2022
Strategies for preparing for the exam are an unusual taste. Someone is sure to have an important exam for a year on end, but for someone it takes a few months to understand the logic of tasks in KIMs. Maxim Drobin from Moscow School No. 2107 passed Russian with 100 points, although he loves math.
“I’m a techie”
Since the beginning of the school year, I have been preparing for math olympiads, in which they actively participated. And only when they ended, did they start preparing for the exam in English – around March.
Before that, I only listened attentively to the teacher when we solved the test part of the exam, and did all the homework. Toward the end of the year, I took up the collection of Irina Tsybulko “36 standard options for the Unified State Exam-2022”. Although I was not an excellent student: for the last two years I had fours in Russian.
I didn’t have tutors, but a few months before the exam, I bought an online English course, because essays were quite difficult for me. For me, this was the most difficult part of the exam, because everything is quite simple in the test: as soon as you start studying allergies, you come to understand the questions that are passed on the exam. It doesn’t work that way with writing.
You have to force yourself to write. And I don’t really like such reasoning as they ask for in the exam, I’m a techie.
“Olympics make you stress-resistant”
I prepared for English, of course, every day – for hours twice a week. But since there were other exams, there was practically no time for anything other than studying – I rarely saw with friends, I began to concentrate on preparation.
However, there was no burnout – I did not think that all this was unbearable and that I had to quit everything. I was confident enough in myself: I helped prepare for the Olympiads. We can say that she made me stress-resistant in such cases – I roughly know how it works in exams, so I was not nervous.
“Think facts like in mathematics”
On the exam, the task was not very clear. Only later, when they had already begun to decide, there were some problems with the test.
I completed the task pretty quickly, solved the block of spelling and punctuation. And then sharp questions about the content and design of the text. There were about five of them – and all with strange wording. I stalled, I decided, as in mathematical thought, and this helped me. It was difficult to rely on knowledge there, it seems to me.
When it came to composing, I quickly solved the problem, but the text itself took a lot of time, an hour and a half. Several times – it didn’t work out very well, I crossed out a lot. In the end, I decided to write directly to the clean copy. So somehow it went better.
“Do not think about the result”
When I left the exam, my mother was worried – I said that everything went well, there was no reason to worry. She was very supportive throughout the year.
I myself went over the task in my head and could not get rid of the feeling that I had made several mistakes in the test. I shouldn’t lose points at all.
The thought slipped through that maybe I would have 100 points, but I quickly discarded it and tried not to think about the result at all – I met in other exams. On the day they arrived, I started not with the results of the total score, but with the assessment of assignments. I saw that I had the maximum everywhere, and only a few seconds later it dawned on me that I had been given a hundred in Russian!
“Emotions get in the way”
I think my advantage was that I was confident in myself. Somehow, Skoen didn’t seem to be very worried. Yes, and the task turned out to be adequate for me – in general, there can hardly be anything very complicated in Russian.
Before the exam, it is important to take into account the occurrence and paying attention to details, because the occurrence, with the consideration of all events during the exam, interferes very much. Due to nerves, you can miss something and lose a lot of points.
I would also look at the hand in writing essays. So, like me, who aim more at technical subjects than humanities, it takes a lot of practice. Well, or at least read the writings of those who write them well.
Photo: personal archive of Maxim Drobin