MATHEMATICAL MODEL AND ALGORITHM OF CARRYING OUT THE CENTRALIZED COMPETITION IN RUSSIAN HIGHER EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS

ABSTRACT

Nowadays the conditions for admission to higher education institutions in Russia can allow centralizing the procedure for competitive selection of applicants across the country to increase the clarity and publicity of this process concerning applicants, as well as to reduce the universities expenses for the admission campaign organization. The federal information system for providing Unified State Exam and admission can become the heart of such centralization, but at the present time there are no algorithms for competitive selection. The research paper suggests a modification of the existing mathematical model for the organization of a centralized competition for higher educational institutions in Russia, which is a multi-criteria task of the objective function of higher educational institutions optimizing (the system of higher education generally), corresponding to enrolling the applicants with the highest score, and the target functions of entrants, consisting in the admission to the most interesting (top-priority) Programme of Study. To grade the applicants, we suggest the evaluation function modification, which includes a new term intended to gradate the entrants having the same scores for their entrance examinations and individual achievements as well. The research also suggests a heuristic iterative algorithm for solving the defined multi-criteria optimization problem, which is based on searching a solution for one particular university in the context of indicating a number of specialties and directions of preparation in the application of each enrollee. We have estimated the speed of the algorithm as logarithmic with the help of an especially designed program. The research shows that the algorithm is applicable for calculating the competitive situation nationwide over executing time.

Keywords: centralized admission to universities; enrollee; Unified State Exam