The second season of the All-Russian Essay Championship «In Your Own Words», conceived as an alternative to the mandatory final essay, has ended. Its participants went through three difficult rounds, and now the winners and prize-winners will receive additional points for the Unified State Examination at 20 participating universities, and 30 people will receive the opportunity to study at the Higher School of Economics at the expense of the university. We tell you if it worked out.
Instead of a template
The idea of the championship «In Your Own Words» appeared almost simultaneously in two universities: the Higher School of Economics and the Moscow City Pedagogical University. Although it all started with the final essay invented by President Putin. Chairman of the expert jury of the championship Mikhail Pavlovets, Associate Professor of the Faculty of Humanities at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, says: “The President instructed that the results of checking these essays be taken into account when entering universities. The Ministry, having finalized the order, ordered that the essay become a meta-subject. But this assignment was not realized: the so-called final essay was called «literary-centric», so that it, in fact, became an essay on literature. Universities rechecked this essay for several years, but soon refused to take into account the results, because most of the essays were stereotyped, sometimes written off and did not say anything about their authors. some alternative. A year later, HSE supervisor Yaroslav Kuzminov also became interested in this — and HSE got its own laboratory: the Project Laboratory for the Development of Intellectual Competitions in the Humanities.
Photo: DIY Essay Championship Page »/Vkontakte
Already in the first year, 16 universities began to take into account the results of the championship when accepting applicants. This year there are 23 of them. Among the co-organizers of the championship are the Ural and Tomsk Federal Universities and National Research Nuclear University MEPhI; the results are accepted, in addition, by eight federal and six state universities, one more St. Petersburg and three Moscow universities.
Last year, due to the pandemic, the championship was held online; in the first round — testing — 10,000 people took part, in the second, regional, where they wrote an essay, about 3 thousand came out, and in the final there were 150 participants. This year, there were 16 thousand people at the first stage, 4200 at the second, 340 came to the Klyazma boarding house near Moscow for the final.
Analysis of memes and holivars
The championship differs radically from the final essay. Directions in the first are known in advance, and already within their framework, students are offered a specific topic. At the same time, reliance on at least one literary source is obligatory. The general knowledge of written speech, the ability to build a coherent reasoning and illustrate it with examples from literature are tested.
The championship «In Your Own Words» every year changes not only the tasks themselves, but also their type — especially in order to participate in everyone could take part in the championship, and not just those who had been preparing for specific tasks with tutors for a long time.
The tasks, according to Mikhail Pavlovets, test four K — key competencies of the 21st century: “This is critical thinking (it is already checked at the test stage), this is creativity — the ability to create, compose, compare. Then, teamwork is tested on the team tour: collaboration and communication. In the same place, at the final stage, the essay-reflection allows all four K to collect and comprehend this experience.
There are three rounds in the championship. Everyone from different regions of Russia and the world participates in the first one, so it must be in absentia, and it must be checked by a computer: it is almost impossible to study tens of thousands of works manually. The task of the first round is to assess the functional literacy of the participants, their skills in working with information. The test, which cuts off the functionally illiterate, is now available online for everyone at the link in their own words.рф/online-test.
The assignments were prepared by young employees of the Project Laboratory for the Development of Intellectual Competitions in the Humanities — HSE students and undergraduates. Theo Dudij, research intern at the lab, says: “We started from scratch. There was a lot of discussion about how to test functional literacy. We tested tasks on our friends, on friends of friends.”
Last year, the task was related to memes: how funny is formed. Masha Orlovskaya, also a trainee researcher, says: “The wording of the task could be as follows: match the statement, the type of logical error, and the meme. For example, with what logical fallacy can we link statements like “The fathers of Russian democracy never tired of repeating that it is dangerous to cross the road at red lights.”
Photo: Do-it-yourself essay championship page/Vkontakte
There were three types of assignments this year. The first is to match the picture with its description and the person who describes it. The second is to find an error in a search query for a large database and understand what exactly in the search results will become inaccessible due to this error. And the third is to analyze a heated discussion on the social network: what methods of persuasion are used, how they manipulate, where they become personal, succumb to emotions or violate logic.
To parody pseudoscience
In the second round, schoolchildren wrote essays in chosen areas (this year there were sixteen essays: from economics and business to art history, from physics and mathematics to sports). Within each direction there are three tasks. For example, participants could be offered to prepare a speech in the State Duma on a topic that concerns them or apply for a grant. Or, as this year, write an April Fool's article so that an incompetent person believes in the truth of pseudoscientific data, and a competent person laughs. Or nominate someone for the Ig Nobel Prize (if you don't know, google it; you can use any source, you can't write it off).
The essay is written on a computer. Therefore, it is easier to check for plagiarism: it takes a matter of seconds.
It is more difficult with the final essay: it is written by hand, to check for plagiarism you will have to retype it manually.
But plagiarism there are few in the championship — single works. In general, the experts who checked the works are very satisfied with their level.
For example, here is what the finalists wrote about, whom I managed to ask after the closing ceremony of the championship. The work of the winner in the direction of «Linguistics» from Kaluga Polina Novinskaya was devoted to the importance of studying not only European, but also Asian languages. Kristina Petrova from Aleksandrov (“Programming and IT-technologies”) wrote about the possibility of time travel. Julia Prokhorova from Yekaterinburg («Philology») composed a dialogue between Mitrofanushka and Tyutchev about the versatility of literature and the different possibilities for interpreting a literary text. Anastasia Zolotareva from Barnaul (“Economics and Business”) wrote about business development in social networks. Kristina Efremova from Kursk («Mathematics and Physics») created a plan for a summer school that would tell about the formation of astronomy as a science. Tomich Alexander Zenkin (“Art History and Cultural Studies”) came up with an educational application about cinema.
One of the prizes for the best work was awarded to Valeria Samohodkina’s essay “How Psychiatrists Turn Their Patients into Drug Addicts.”
I tried to find out from expert psychiatrist Sergei Potanin how a work on such a strange topic got into the number of winners. “Yeah, you bought it!” he reacted. Yes, it was just one of the «April Fools» works.
Azamat Naiman, head of the psychological service of Tomsk State University, says: «I read works on psychology, and these works made a powerful impression: these schoolchildren think much more sophisticated than I used to be. For example, in the topic “Psychology from the point of view of pseudoscience,” students had to choose, for example, astrology or Tarot cards — and present them as real psychological scientific knowledge. The intensity of sophistication was magnificent. I read with a smile.