The admission board of the Kyiv National Shevchenko University invited the observer from the civil network “OPORA” to watch over all parts of the creative contest for future journalists. On one hand, such initiative proved the eagerness of the authorities for sound communication. On the other hand, it helps the community to find out the problems in the admission campaign organization and offer some solutions.
In general, the creative contest in the Institute of Journalism is aimed at the revealing of the ability to reproduce facts. This year the graduates took part in the specially organized press conference with the talks on the topic of modern Ukrainian literature. The works of the participants were evaluated according to five criteria – precision of the expressed theses, logic and literacy of the text and the quality of the title. In addition to all this, the participants had the possibility to get 4 extra points for the accuracy of the execution, maturity of the theses and high grammar proficiency.
To avoid the biases in the process of checking, the papers of the participants were ciphered for the first time in the independent Ukraine. Two persons – the deputy secretary of the admission board and the deputy head of the committee for working with students – were involved in the process of ciphering. But, despite the visible eagerness of the admission board to organize the contest in a proper way, OPORA can’t help paying attention to two important notes.
Firstly, the selective committee doesn’t know who and where did write the test that is now being checked. The protocol – the document for writing down the participants of the test and the people, who coped with it, is not presupposed by the procedure of the contest. After the graduates finished writing the creative task, the papers are put into the ordinary files carried by the committee members in the numerous passages. So, the committee can’t be sure that the test was written by the participant in the testing room and not put into the file behind its door. After counting the tests it turned out that six of them are of the unknown origin – the number of papers carried out of the room doesn’t correspond with the number of the ciphered papers.
The members of the admission board agree that the transportation of the papers to the ciphering room is completely on the examiners’ head – and there are nearly 60 such examiners. So, the logic of the test is missed: why cipher the tests excluding the human factor and make the next stage completely based on the trust to the personnel?
The second crucial note is the profound blurredness of the criteria for the evaluation. The examiners tried to use the criteria of literacy – the definite number of points for the number of mistakes. One of the examiners tried to offer the evaluation rules used during the external independent testing, but nobody supported him hence the rules were hard to recollect. As a result, the Dean of the Institute of Journalism offered to “refer to the type of the mistake”. As we remember, more than 20 groups were involved in the evaluation, and such inconsistency fosters the subjectivism and the non-uniform evaluation of the graduates.
Recommendations
The creative contest for the prestige faculty of the renowned university is in the public eye and therefore requires the precise and transparent rules. The creative contests and its detailed criteria are approbated by the Ukrainian center for the evaluation of the quality of education. The observers from OPORA consider that the scheme of the above-criticized run of the contest can be totally borrowed from the UCEQE.
The project of the observing the admission campaign 2011 is performed with the aid of the International “Renaissance” fund and the Program of the independent testing support in Ukraine
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