‘The Format We Are Proposing Is the Most Suitable’

On June 10, elective course registration campaign started at HSE University. Due to technical issues, this year access to registration is given in stages depending on a student's place in the cumulative ranking. Anna Korovko, Senior Director of Full Degree Programmes, explains why this format has been accepted.

Anna Korovko
Senior Director for Full Degree Programmes

Due to technical issues with the module for enrolment in elective courses, it was decided to postpone registration from June 7 to 10 and to divide students into groups according to their place in the cumulative ranking. This decision was taken jointly by the management of the University's Academic and IT Units after discussing the current situation with the Rector. The proposed scheme was also agreed with the Education Quality Committee of the HSE Student Council.

However, the proposed method has provoked a negative reaction from many students. We have received objections (from both individuals and whole groups) who feel that the decision to give the right to choose first to students from the top of the ranking is unfair.

I understand the negative feedback, but I also think that the format we are proposing is the best. It is to be expected that in the first minutes of the start of the campaign a large number of students enter the portal. Unfortunately, at the moment the LMS is not ready for such a load, and we inevitably encounter the problem of ‘a bottle neck’. And the ‘first one to click is the first one to sign up’ format itself does not seem quite right and has often been subject to criticism.

Suggestions to apply selection criteria to the most popular elective courses similar to those for the minors (additional tracks), have been made by students both last year and this year. Our IT services will evolve, and over time we will be able to offer several options for selecting students for a particular course.

The current option is to delimit access time to the system as a whole, depending on the level of academic success of a student. This is an interim measure in the development of the more intelligent future selection systems.

The current registration campaign for elective courses differs from previous ones in several ways: a significant proportion of courses (in both the compulsory, elective and optional parts of the curriculum) are offered in an inter-campus or inter-programme option. This means that students from different programmes, different courses and different campuses can choose to study the same discipline. Another fundamental innovation is the choice of a slot in the timetable made by the student himself/herself.

With such features of the educational model, proposals to divide student flows for entry by departments, by campuses, by courses seem less logical and less fair than applying the criterion associated with cumulative ranking. The latter shows a student's academic activity and learning outcomes over the entire period of study since admission to HSE University.

As a reminder, this is the criterion that has been applied for the past three years in enrolling first-year students in minors. It is the cumulative rating that demonstrates how active a student is in mastering the main educational programme and how proactive he/she is in studying additional disciplines, completing projects before his/her fellow students.

Overall, there are no fewer places in the disciplines than in previous years. Places in disciplines included in several educational programmes are mostly quota-based: separate slots are allocated for each of the programmes. Pre-selection disciplines have emerged — where the final decision on enrolment in a discipline is made by the teacher, who carries out an additional study of the students' applications — by rating, portfolio or through tests or additional questions.

June 10, 2021