Admission Campaign – 2014: June

Dr. Lyudmila Tovarnichenko, Executive Secretary of the Admission Commission of Astrakhan State University, has told us about the 2014 Admission Campaign during the first summer month.

“June is a traditional beginning of the hot times, not just because the weather is getting hotter, but also because the Admission Campaign enters an active phase. Secondary school graduates have received their documents of education of a new standard this year; their documents were given to them not all at once, but gradually, and that made our work easier. Most of our prospective students applied for distance education.

In June, we had the first wave of entrance exams for those prospective students who got their documents of secondary education before 2009. The second wave is for those who’ll submit their documents in July; the third wave is to be in August (for those who’ll cover a distance education program).

We had a rather uneasy situation, because the federal authorities reduced the minimal scores necessary to obtain a document of secondary education; at the same time we were forbidden to reduce our minimal entrance scores for our prospective students. For example, many young people who got 20 scores in Math (which is enough to get a document of secondary education after school studies) can’t claim to get a higher education at our University (our minimal acceptable scores in Math are 28 for those whose studies will be financed by the federal budget and 25 for those who will pay for their studies themselves). We’d advise such folks to enter the Technical College of our University, and after they graduate from it in 2 or 3 years, they’d be admitted to ASU after taking exams that our University arranges itself. We have a reduced program for graduates of our College who wish to enhance their education in a similar program at the stage of higher education.

There were much stricter requirements towards arrangement of the Unified State Examination at secondary schools this year, and many young people got lower scores. That can provoke a decrease in minimal acceptable scores necessary to enter our University in all the specialties.

Although our Admission Commission’s official office hours are from 09:00 a.m. to 05:00 p.m., we had to work almost 12 hours a day during the first days after school graduates got their documents of education. We had to work so much, because there were crowds of potential students, who maybe had some personal reasons to submit their documents as soon as possible. Every year, we ask our future students not to hurry up, because successful admission depends not on how soon you submitted your documents, but on how high your exam scores are. As a rule, we have no long queues after July 10 as in late June and in early July. Our future students and their parents can enjoy comfortable conditions to wait in a queue: we give them a voucher with their personal queue number; they’re accompanied to large halls to watch a film about ASU; they can ask our staff any question and decide which specialty is of a higher priority for them.

I’d like to remind that our University offers its future students about 1, 500 positions to get education on budget-financed terms (1, 013 positions for bachelors programs and 412 ones for master programs). Our official web site publishes the number of submitted applications to this or that particular specialty on a daily basis.

We’re looking forward to meeting you at our University!”

Interviewed by T.Yu. Gavrilkina (the Innovative Laboratory of Information Linguistics of ASU)