Final state examination of pupils’ academic achievement and students’ academic performance in higher educational institutions in the Republic of Karelia

in recent years, professors of the Institute of Mathematics and Information Technologies of Petro-zavodsk State University have noted the following tendency: many students are becoming increas-ingly unable to cope with the traditional courses in science and mathematics due to insufficient knowledge and skills in Mathematics at a school level even though the students might have high scores in the final exam in Mathematics. A research was carried out targeting PetrSU applicants re-siding in the Republic of Karelia from the point of view of exam scores, the academic performance of first and second-year students, the correlation between the school exam score and academic per-formance of the university students. The database of the research was formed by the exam scores in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science and the Russian Language in the Republic of Karelia within the period of 2014−2017, as well as data on the academic performance of PetrSU students during the first year of study in Mathematics. As a result of the research, we detected a weak link-age between an applicant’s exam score in Mathematics and a university student’s average score in Mathematics. One of the crucial reasons for this may be the following factor: the school exam scores do not reflect the actual level of knowledge of students in Mathematics whereas it is a requirement for effective performance at the university level. As a result, the university is forced to spend its re-sources to fill in the gaps in students’ basic school knowledge.