This year, for the first time since moving from St. Petersburg Acad. . Here we want to sum up some results of the enrollment, as well as tell about the impressions of our first-year students from two months of study.
Who came to us
The admission target for the program in 2019 was 40 places. For these places, we recruited 11 winners of the first level Olympiads, three people according to the quota and 26 people according to the Unified State Examination. The passing score according to the results of the budget admission was 296 points out of 310 possible (300 for the Unified State Examination and 10 for individual achievements). In addition, 37 people came to us as part of a commercial reception. The minimum USE score for this category of applicants for the program was 242 points. Finally, 13 people entered as part of the admission of foreigners from other CIS countries. In total, we received 90 first-year students at the entrance.
90 people for us is quite a large number compared to the number of students with whom we are accustomed to working while at St. Petersburg State University - there the maximum admission did not exceed 40 people. In addition, since only state-funded places were accepted at SPbAU, the composition of students who have now come to our program has become more heterogeneous.
To understand who we will have to deal with, on September 1, we conducted a rather serious test of freshmen. The guys had three separate entrance tests: in mathematics, algorithms and programming. Each test lasted an hour and a half. The results were quite expected (see the figure): on average, Olympiad students wrote the test best, then state employees, then those accepted for commerce, then quotas, and worst of all, foreigners.
How we solved the problem of different levels of preparation of first-year students
The results of the entrance testing also prompted us to make a rather obvious decision - to divide all applicants into two streams of 45 people each: conditionally strong and conditionally weak. Conditionally - since we assessed at the entrance testing not the intellectual level of the applicants, but the amount of input knowledge. It rather depends not on the person, but on where he came to us from and what kind of input knowledge he had.
We could not and did not want to make different programs for these two streams. The main task of the separation was, firstly, to obtain a more or less homogeneous composition of students in one lecture hall, and secondly, to more flexibly regulate the pace and degree of detail of the material presented. In addition, each stream was divided into three groups for practical exercises. Despite the same topics, the level of tasks and their number differed from group to group. The first group was offered the largest and most complex set of tasks, the sixth - the shortest and easiest.
In fact, both the first stream and the three groups into which we divided it for internships approximately corresponded to the level of students whom we recruited for a similar program in SPbAU all previous years. The level of the second stream was quite different from it. We emphasize once again: not in terms of the intellectual abilities of students, but in terms of the level of initial training. So, some students never really wrote in any programming language, some did not know algorithms at all before. And, despite the fact that each of the subjects of the first semester began with the very basics, the pace of the classes and the level of tasks in practice still assumed a fairly good level of input knowledge. To be honest, this would have ended for the majority of students of the second course, because mastering our program from scratch is almost impossible even for strong students. And here both us and our first-year students were literally saved by our senior students.
Back in August, we found fourth-year students who were ready to help us with the first year and become curators of subgroups. As a result, each group of the first year was assigned its own curator, plus a certain number of senior students appeared who were ready to help us with practices, answer students' questions, conduct consultations and additional classes. In addition, we asked them to monitor the general mood of the first-year students: mark those students who did something wrong, give moral support to those who did not succeed.
All these forms of support turned out to be both extremely effective and highly demanded, especially by students of the second stream. The curators communicated with them every day, both personally and in Telegram chats. As a rule, we learned about specific problems associated with a particular student, almost on the same day when these problems began. And they tried to solve these problems in one way or another, arranging personal and / or collective consultations, conducting additional classes, simply meeting with these students. And it really helped - most of the first-year students more or less successfully passed the exams and tests of the first module. To date, the losses amounted to 8 people, and half of them dropped out during the first two weeks, having found out for themselves that they simply made a mistake with the program.
What students say after two months of study
Two weeks ago, we conducted a survey among freshmen. They asked, as usual, about the quality of teaching of individual subjects, and, more importantly, about the general impressions of the program. First of all, the feedback showed that the expectations from admission to the program were justified by the absolute majority.
The reaction to the load was also expected. One of the most common responses was "I knew it would be difficult, but I didn't think it would be that hard." Some more of them: "Haven't been outside since September 1", "The load is not designed for ordinary people", "I'm running cross-country at a sprint speed, how long will I last?".
The guys have almost no time for anything other than studying. The most popular type of extracurricular activity was sleep. At the same time, to the question βDo you think that the load should be reducedβ, the majority nevertheless answered that this should not be done: βHonestly, I have no idea how to reduce the load, since everything is importantβ, βThe load is unexpected, but, probably, that's how it should be."
The students of the first stream rate the general atmosphere at 4.64 on a five-point scale, the second stream - at 4.07. General comments: βEverything is very interesting and to the pointβ, βReally strong direction, great teachers and a lot of workloadβ, βA lot of everything new, useful, applicable. Difficult and interesting. The teachers are cool. And I haven't died yet."
Summing up, we can say that in general we seem to have coped with new challenges: the heterogeneity of the stream and the increased number of students. At the same time, it was possible not to lose either the quality or the intensity of the program. Now it remains to wait for the results of the first session and compare our expectations with the real results of the students.
Source: habr.com