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Vocational Pre-University Institute of Exact Sciences (in Spanish: Instituto Preuniversitario Vocacional de Ciencias Exactas) are Cuban Pre-university or High School Institutes with very special characteristics. For instance, these schools have a similar program to the AP's classes in American High Schools. Schools of this kind were founded with a common goal: to increase the number of students that study scientific careers with a higher education and general preparation.There is a really higher educational system in comparison with the normal system applied in all of the other schools around the country. ==Academics and student body== Admission to the school is highly competitive. Students are required to excel in a number of exams, currently Mathematics, Spanish, and History; the highest scores are granted admission to the school (which is free, like all schools in the island). There are three years of schooling, no student is allowed to repeat, and students enter when they are 14 or 15 yrs old and leave when they are 17 or 18.Students are required to maintain a performance over 85% and if it declines, especially in any of the four core science classes (Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, and Biology), they must leave the school. The overwhelming majority of the students go on to attend one of the 5-year universities in Cuba. Up until the nineties, students were grouped according to specializations, based on their interests, and so, besides the general curriculum, a student in a Biology group would receive a larger component of this class, and the same with Chemistry, Mathematics, Physics, and Humanities groups. Since the nineties and until now, all students receive the same general curriculum, with four groups composed mostly of students who won provincial or national competitions in any one of the four sciences in junior high (called secundaria básica in Cuba), they are called "high performance" (alto rendimiento) groups, and are given extra, high level content in their area. Students can opt out of this special training during the three years, and are routinely tested in order to stay in. The Computer Science "high performance" group is formed early on based on declared interest and a set of tests. Many Cuban leading scientists have come from these schools, and the offspring of top government officials attend the schools, especially V.I.Lenin (Havana's IPVCE). Many of Fidel Castro's descendants (sons and grandsons) have studied there. The schools used to be equipped with almost state-of-the-art laboratories, gifts from the Soviet nations; some laboratories are still working, but no single instrument has been replaced in over twenty years, and most lay covered in dust, lacking maintenance, and the materials to run the experiments with. It can't be said that there aren't any problems in these schools, but the composition of its student body makes problems much less common and of a different sort than in most of Cuba's high schools. Students still dance -a lot- in the halls, read, form and destroy bonds, chat, smoke -even when it's forbidden-, and sometimes some of them -risking being kicked out- flee the institution in order to explore the surroundings (in Havana's Lenin the Botanic Garden is right by the field students use to play soccer and jog). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Vocational Pre-University Institute of Exact Sciences」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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