Fears about School Exams Exaggerated
Parents of school students in Moscow tend to believe that test assignments in two major final exams—the Basic State Exam (BSE) and the Unified State Exam (USE)—are too complex and teachers fail to properly prepare students for the finals; this negative attitude, which appears to be a widely-held stereotype not necessarily supported by evidence, is formed long before the exams come round. However, according to a study by Alina Pishnyak and Natalia Khalina, once the exams are over, families no longer consider them so hard to pass.
How Programmers Help Unravel the Secrets of Physics
The Summer School on Machine Learning in High Energy Physics, which was co-organised by the HSE Faculty of Computer Science and Russian internet company Yandex, has ended. Below, the Head of HSE's Laboratory of Methods for Big Data Analysis, Andrey Ustyuzhanin, talks about the various ways in which physicists and programmers cooperate. He also discusses how researchers from HSE and Yandex have been participating in CERN experiments and how ordinary smartphone users can help unravel the secrets of the universe.
HSE Political Scientists Discuss Their Research at APSA Meeting
In San Francisco, the 111th annual meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA) – one of the largest international conferences in the field of political science – recently took place. Scholars from HSE presented their research on forum panels such as ‘Fiscal Politics in Federal Systems’, ‘Social Policy in Non-democracies: Dynamics of Social Policy Debates in Russia’, ‘Incumbents and Elections in Developing Countries’, and ‘Power in 21st Century World Politics’.
Young People Migrate to Cities with Good Reputation
The opportunity to find an interesting and well-paid job, a comfortable socio-cultural environment, and friendly and professional contacts in the new location are all essential factors for graduates of universities from Russian regions who are planning to move to another city. Saida Ziganurova , Research Assistant at the HSE Center for Institutional Studies, studied the migration potential among young professionals.
65%
of full-time students at Russian universities studied free of charge in 2014.
Entrepreneurship is About More than Just Money
On September 14 2015, Dr Alina Sorgner will give a talk at the annual meeting of the HSE Laboratory for Entrepreneurial Research on 'Does Entrepreneurship Pay? Empirical Analysis of Incomes of Self-employed, as Compared to Wages of Paid Employees'. Ahead of her visit to HSE Moscow, the young academic gave an interview to HSE English News Service about variations in entrepreneurship in post-communist countries and about her cooperation with HSE.
Russians’ Scientific Literacy on the Rise, but only a Third Know Plants Have Genes
Educational media is expanding rapidly in Russia, while scientists are giving more lectures on popular science to packed auditoriums and more scientific festivals are taking place than ever before. But do these efforts actually pay off? As part of a monitoring survey on innovative behaviour in Russia, experts from the HSE Institute for Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge (ISSEK) have found that over a five-year period spent measuring the scientific literacy of the Russian public, the percentage of people who find it difficult to answer ‘elementary school’ questions – for example, questions about the Earth’s core or continental drift – is steadily declining. But questions any more specific than that continue to leave people scratching their heads.
Cultural Institutions Are Adopting New Practices
Many young employees of museums, art centres and galleries, libraries and publishing houses move up the career ladder fairly fast, yet workplace success comes at a cost, forcing them to work beyond normal hours and outside formal job descriptions. Nevertheless, employees of cultural institutions are prepared to make the extra effort to help their organisations survive, according to Margarita Kuleva, lecturer at the Department of Sociology, HSE campus in St. Petersburg.
10,000 roubles
is the amount of one-time targeted payments to poor families in 13 Russian regions, which is ineffective when it comes to families becoming self-sufficient.
Social Stratification Reproduced in Education
By choosing education for their children, parents tend to perpetuate social inequalities. While educated middle-class parents invest in their children's future by selecting the best possible school and becoming actively involved in the educational process, working-class families often feel they cannot afford to choose and instead, send children to the nearest school, expecting them to make it on their own, according to Larisa Shpakovskaya, Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, HSE Campus in St. Petersburg.