Salvation or Utopia
To fully feel the difference between the Unified State Exam and regular exams, it is enough to recall what the summer was like for graduates who finished school more than ten years ago. Throughout the school year, they crammed exam tickets, solved tasks similar to tests, and wrote dictations. And so the school year came to an end, and the final exams began.
After taking them, the most dreaded summer of children's lives began. They had to choose a university (or more than one!), run around with documents to admissions committees, take a bunch of entrance exams, and nervously wait to see where they would get in. Probably, most of those graduates, when they learned that the Unified State Exam would be both a final and entrance exam, were happy for future applicants and even envied them.
Indeed, now the system of graduation and admission is much simpler. Students take the Unified State Exam, receive certificates, email them to several universities, and wait for their names to appear on the admission lists. As for the objectivity of the state exam, that is also quite good. If exams, for example, based on tickets, covered only one year of the school course, then the state exams contain tasks based on the entire school curriculum. Twenty tickets could be learned, memorized, and with a good grade, one could not say that the student is graduating with a decent knowledge base. But if a student scores an 'excellent' on the Unified State Exam, one can conclude that ten years of school were not wasted.
Moreover, the Unified State Exam completely eliminates the dependence of the grade on external factors. It has long been no secret that in oral exams, grades were significantly inflated for 'favorites', eyes were closed to cheat sheets, or problematic students were failed by difficult questions. And in the state exam, besides the CMMs (control and measuring materials), a pen, and their own knowledge, graduates have nothing else and can have nothing else in the exam rooms.
Many say that such excessive strictness during the exam throws students off balance and prevents them from concentrating. In my opinion, the impossibility of cheating should not distract students but should make them prepare better for exams and start studying not in the last month before graduation, but much earlier.
Most likely, there are so many dissatisfied people because they are used to using cheat sheets, sitting through lessons without studying the subjects, but chatting and having fun. In essence, the Unified State Exam teaches children to think about their future while still in school, which allows teachers to produce more and more responsible students year after year. There are quite a few analogues of our Unified State Exam abroad, and there are few complaints there.
I believe that one just needs to study. When you are backed by knowledge, not by cheat sheets and the famous Russian 'avos' (perhaps), then it doesn't matter what exam you take. After all, it is not without reason that they say that knowledge is power.