All exams in the Unified State Exam format can be rewritten once directly this year, without wasting a year waiting. This proposal was made by deputies from the New People faction. The amendments have already been submitted to the lower house of parliament. In this way, it will be possible to reduce stress among graduates, the authors are sure. Rosobrnadzor, however, has repeatedly stated that they do not plan changes in the procedure for retaking exams.
The State Duma proposes to enshrine in the Law “On Education” the opportunity to retake the Unified State Exam in each subject in the current academic year. The corresponding bill was submitted to the House of Parliament by representatives of the New People faction on Tuesday, April 21.
According to the initiative, Unified State Exam participants will be able to rewrite any of the exams they have passed, but no more than once.
Currently, 11th grade graduates have the opportunity to retake only one of the exams if they are not satisfied with the results. To retake the rest of the Unified State Exam, they are forced to skip a year and write it with those who studied a year younger.
“New People,” we note, have previously introduced similar amendments to the State Duma. Thus, in April 2022, representatives of the faction prepared a bill that proposed allowing schoolchildren to retake the Unified State Exam within a month if they were not satisfied with the result obtained. Rosobrnadzor then called the proposals contained in the document redundant.
Less than two years later, in February 2024, Vladimir Putin came up with the idea of “giving a second chance to graduates” when addressing the Federal Assembly. The President said that eleventh-graders should have the opportunity, even before the end of the admissions campaign to universities, to rewrite an exam whose results were not satisfactory to them. At that time, Rosobrnadzor did not consider the proposal excessive, and the first retakes took place in the summer. While developing the regulatory framework for the procedure, the department decided that only graduates of the current year would be able to take advantage of the opportunity, and the results of the first attempt would become invalid and it would be impossible to choose the best one. Many experts then notedthat this was done to reduce the popularity of the retake, and therefore the costs of organizing it. As a result, in 2024, 105 thousand people, or approximately a fifth of all eleventh-graders, retook the exams; 73% improved their results. In 2025, 30 thousand more people came to take the retake, and 77% of them were able to improve their score.
In the explanatory note to the bill, the authors indicate that the outcome of admission to a university depends not on one, but, as a rule, on three subjects.
“If a graduate, for objective reasons – due to strong anxiety, health, overwork or other stress factors – shows an underestimated result in two core subjects at once, the current norm does not give him the opportunity to fully correct the situation in the same year,” note the parliamentarians. Therefore, they propose to establish the possibility of retaking the Unified State Exam in all subjects at the federal law level.
At the time of publication of the material, the department did not answer Kommersant’s questions about its attitude to the initiative. However, the head of Rosobrnadzor, Anzor Muzaev, has repeatedly stated that changing the retake rules is “inappropriate.” So, last summer, he told reporters that this would complicate the exam campaign too much, so “there are no plans to expand this measure.”
“The opportunity to retake the Unified State Exam in each subject will significantly reduce the psychological burden on schoolchildren and will help responsible students, who often worry the most, to pass the exam with the results for which they really know the subject,” says Irina Abankina, professor at the Institute of Education at the National Research University Higher School of Economics. She calls the proposal of the deputies “timely and correct” and adds that this is especially necessary “in the context of an increase in passing scores for universities and special competition for points.” However, she notes that for Rosobrnadzor such an expansion of the Unified State Examination procedure will be “expensive both financially and organizationally.”
