A schoolgirl from Yekaterinburg has voiced concerns over the difficulty of specialized mathematics tasks in the Unified State Exam (EGE), following similar complaints from students in Moscow. The exam, taken on May 27th, has sparked controversy after versions of the tasks from various Russian regions surfaced online.

The student alleges that the second part of the exam, consisting of seven complex problems with detailed solutions, was significantly harder in the Urals compared to Moscow and the Far East. These tasks carry the highest point value.

The schoolgirl expressed fears that this discrepancy could disadvantage students from the provinces in their chances of entering universities in Moscow and other developed cities. She stated that the difficulty of the tasks was unexpected. She also said parents and teachers were upset and that she, despite two years of preparation, felt unprepared for the exam’s level of difficulty, anticipating a score lower than her practice test results.

Examples of the challenging tasks have been circulated, covering topics such as trigonometry, exponential equations, economics, parameter problems, and number theory, with comparisons made between tasks reportedly from the Urals and Central Russia.

Natalia Pevneva, a mathematics tutor and head of the Epsilon tutoring center in Yekaterinburg, confirmed that some of the tasks have been published online. She believes the first part of the exam was standard and easy to solve. Pevneva noted that while the parameter task (18) varied slightly by region, the underlying solution method remained consistent. She also acknowledged the inherent difficulty of the number theory task, stating that it lacks a fixed solution algorithm.