The purpose of this paper was to investigate the impact of family and school background on the student achievements in PISA 2009 and in the Unified State Exam (USE).  The test specifications of PISA and USE are completely different ones.  PISA aims at assessing the competencies in reading, math and science. In other words, that is to test how well students can use their knowledge and skills to cope with the real life situations and problems. The theoretical construct of the competency is concerned as a result of learning in wide multiple context, not just in school. On the other hand, the USE does not tend to measure the competencies or the literacy as a meta-subject outcomes. It is the course-oriented achievement test to assess how well school-leavers memorized and understood the curriculum-based learned material. Although as it has been demonstrated repeatedly that the family background affects the wide range of the learning and life outcomes, we assume that there are differences in the mechanism and the strength of these effects on scores of the different tests.

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