Andrei S. Shurup

The problem of lack of competitiveness in state-of-the-art education is getting a substantial problem for Russian education development. The phenomenon of competitiveness, applied to the system of education, provides an overview of different rating scales, allowing us to evaluate different aspects of competitiveness and quality of Russian education. According to the set of criteria, Russia demonstrates consistent indicators in many ways: results of education, internal unity, effectiveness of resource utilization. In that time, the most problematic results are related to indicators of economic effectiveness of education, development of scientific-educational sets and collaborations, practical effect of education. In these conditions, the digital transformation is based on one of the most important systemic solutions to all the problems, which means that it is especially important in connection with pandemics. The main result of the articles is the annotations of the six major projects of modernization and the increase of competitiveness of the Russian system of vocational education in the context of digital transformations of educational means.

The existing system of final certification in the form of the Unified State Exam (USE) has been working for more than one year. However, disputes about its expediency and effectiveness do not subside. Some participants of these discussions rightly indicate that USE allows enrollees from remote regions of Russia to participate in introductory tests, remaining in their region. Their opponents are equally rights to criticize the apparent shortcomings of this form of control and offer to abandon the USE in favor of the Soviet system of the final certification, in which final exams at school and introductory tests in higher or secondary special educational institutions were not combined. Agreeing with supporters of the organization of local exams, the authors consider the arguments of opponents of the USE. The idea of a project called the USE can be conditionally formulated as follows: to create a line of tasks that makes it possible to compare all high school graduates by the level of training, rank them based on the results of this comparison, and distribute them between universities and colleges. For this reason, the USE is a mandatory exam for all school graduates and is conducted using a single technology. What issues are discussed in the disputes around this project? First, many are perplexed by the unreasonable identification of each school graduate with an enrollee for some university or colleges. Second, a high percentage of dropouts among first-year students indicates a weak correlation between the results of such measurements and the readiness of enrollees to study at universities or colleges. This publication is devoted to the analyzing of the problems discussed within these topics, as well as proposals on possible ways to resolve them.