Introduction. Today, one of the most debatable issues currently discussed in the professional community is the problem of the effectiveness of teacher education system. A significant number of the leaders of the educational sector and the expert community are convinced that teacher training system has long ceased to meet the challenges of the time and needs to be reorganised. The most radical position was declared at the Higher School of Economics: “To stop the degradation of education, it is necessary to include all pedagogical institutions of higher education into the composition of classical universities, as it is done in most Anglo-Saxon countries”. The underlying claims to the pedagogical system are the significant extent to which graduates of pedagogical institutions avoid working in their specialty, as well as the overproduction of pedagogical specialists in the absence of need for them. Meanwhile, instead of substantiated quantitative estimates of these phenomena in the literature, we will find only approximate figures calculated on limited statistics obtained by experts. The aim of the present research is to review the results of employment of graduates of higher education institutions trained in teacher specialties, relying on a new information base – federal statistical observation form No. ОО-1 “Information about the organisation providing training for educational programmes of primary general, basic general, secondary general education”, and the assessment of the effectiveness of teacher education system based on a quantitative approach. Methodology and research methods. The methodological framework of the research is based on the systematic approach in which general scientific (comparative, retrospective analysis, systematization, generalisation) and statistical research methods (statistical and correlation analysis, etc.) were employed. Results and scientific novelty. In the current research, it is proved that the allegations of low efficiency of the system of teacher education are untenable. In assessing the profile employment of graduates, the market for pedagogical labour is limited by experts to job vacancies in secondary schools, while institutions of pre-school, additional, special correctional, as well as secondary and higher professional education fall out of sight. Moreover, graduates of all pedagogical specialties (educators, masters of vocational training, speech therapists, psychologists, additional education teachers, etc.), as well as extramural graduates, are mistakenly included in the number of young specialists – teachers. As a result, the actual amount of teacher training is unjustifiably overstated. A comparison of overstated training with an understated number of jobs inevitably leads to erroneous estimates of the effectiveness of the training system. In addition, it was established that the admission to schools of young teachers of higher qualification is 25–30% higher than the actual graduation of students of teaching specialties of the full-time department of universities, which would be impossible if the graduate employment profile was low. This excess is explained by the minimisation of the volume of teacher training to a critical level and the growing recruitment to teacher positions of non-specialists teachers, which is caused by errors in planning of determining the benchmarks for enrollment to study at universities. Practical significance. The authors believe that this article will allow to clarify approaches to assessing the effectiveness of teacher education system and adjust the control figures for university admission in the field of “Education and Pedagogical Sciences” in accordance with the current personnel supply and demand.

Introduction. Nowadays, an important criterion for the effectiveness of vocational education is the demand for graduates in the labour market. In order to ensure maximum compliance of the structure of training of specialists with the needs of the economy in personnel, the Ministry of Education and Science of theRussian Federation annually establishes admission quotas in universities on the basis of regional development forecasts. However, one of the options for the distribution of admission quotas in recent years has become an inter-university competition, as a result of which budget places are transferred to educational institutions only on the basisindicators of their effectiveness, i.e. excluding the dynamics of local labour markets. While the problems of coordination of admission quotas and the need for personnel are sufficiently covered in the literature, the mechanism of the distribution of places in the competition has been insufficiently studied so far.The aim of this research was to analyse the mechanism of competitive distribution of admission quotas on the example of higher education institutions, which provide training for bachelor and specialist programmes in the field of “Education and Pedagogical Sciences”.Methodology and research methods. The present research is based on the methodology of integrated research, including the methods of comparative and statistical analysis of data, their systematisation and generalisation.Results and scientific novelty. It is shown that the process of distribution of admission quotas is generated in accordance with the official competitive selection methodology. The study established that none of the indicators applied in the calculations of the effectiveness of universities’ activities were statistically related to the results of the competition. The main reason for the inability of the competitive mechanism to carry out the correct ranking of participants in terms of success is the major methodological and mathematical errors inherent in the algorithms for determining the effectiveness of educational organisations. As a result, the number of budget places allocated to each university is largely determined by chance. The results of the competitive distribution of admission quotas depend only on the industry sector of educational institutions. The widespread development of the idea of quoting of budgetary education on indicators of an interuniversity competition will inevitably aggravate a disproportion problem between territorial training and demand for them in regions. There will certainly be a deficiency of young specialists due to low mobility of graduates of the Russian higher school and reduction of the contingent of provincial higher education institutions-outsiders. Conversely, the personnel surplus will appear in the regional educational institutions (mainly metropolitan), which won the competitions. The proposals on correction of the evolving negative socio-economic situation are formulated.Practical significance. The authors believe that the research results will make it possible to thoroughly discuss the rectilinear projection of effective outcome monitoring in higher education institutions for competitive distribution of admission quotas and the feasibility of holding a competition in general. Moreover, the results of the present study contribute to the method of competitive distribution of university admission quotas.

Introduction. For more than two decades, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development has been organising a number of comparative studies of the quality of education in different countries. One of them is the study of mathematics and science education TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study), which is conducted jointly with the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievements (IEA). The last, seventh, cycle of the study was conducted in 2019. TIMSS statistics is regularly posted in the public domain on the IEA website so that specialists can independently conduct research in any aspect of their interest. One of the areas of analysis in this case is traditionally the search for the causes of certain test results, which are determined by the peculiarities of the organisation of the educational process and the context of learning in different countries. At the same time, a study of professional literature showed that among the factors of the social and school context, the analysis of which is provided by the research tools, only an extremely limited range of them turned out to be statistically directly related to TIMSS scores. Specialists systematically encounter inexplicable absence or low correlation values of TIMSS test scores and context indicators. The authors think that the main reason for such difficulties is inattention to the peculiarities of the indicators used in the calculation of measures of statistical relationships. Aim. The present research aims to identify a statistical relationship between test results and indicators of the context of schoolchildren’s learning, as well as the influence of the TIMSS information collection and processing system on the productivity of analysing the research results.Methodology and research methodology. The methodological basis of the work is a systematic approach, which is based on the consideration of the results of the international TIMSS study as a whole: i.e. a complex of interrelated elements (organisations, tools, assessment indicators, scoring systems). The work was carried out on the basis of applied research procedures (observation, description, comparison, measurement, etc.), within which general scientific (comparative analysis, systematisation, generalisation) and statistical research methods (statistical and correlation analysis, etc.) were also used. The source of information was the International Database of Electronic Testing TIMSS-2019, hosted in the IEA repository. The TIMSS datasets were analysed using the IEA International Database (IDB) parser plug-in for SPSS (version 4.0).Results. For most indicators of the social and student context of learning, the authors found the absence or low value of statistical relationships with TIMSS scores. The number of books at home and parents’ education turned out to be statistically related to TIMSS scores concerning the indicators of social well-being and home learning conditions envisaged by the organisers. The indicators of learning conditions at school included the frequency of independent work in class; motivational factors included plans to continue education and self-evaluation of students’ math proficiency. Evidently, even these relationships turned out to be weak. It was revealed that the difficulties in detecting a correlation between TIMSS scores and learning conditions are caused by the very nature of the analysed variables: 1. the approximate nature of individual student assessments used in TIMSS; 2. low differentiation of students according to a number of indicators of the learning context; 3. insufficient reliability of information obtained from sociological surveys of schoolchildren.Practical significance. The authors believe that in order to improve the quality of analytical work on relevant topics, it is necessary to pay close attention to the essence behind the variables used in statistical calculations. In turn, the TIMSS organisers need to continue improving the measurement procedures and research tools by introducing additional success criteria that reflect the individual and comparable results of students in the current TIMSS cycle, as well as indicators of the reliability of contextual information obtained by sociological means.

Introduction. With the introduction of a new attestation procedure of school graduates in the form of the Unified State Examination (USE), coaching has gained widespread acceptance in Russia. By some estimates, between a quarter and a half of school graduates have recourse to one-to-one coaching when preparing for the USE. However, the question of the efficiency of such lessons remains open. Recently, various publications in professional periodicals and the media have begun to appear, which cast doubt on the benefits of coaching. The authors of these publications are specialists of the Higher School of Economics (HSE). According to their studies, additional lessons in preparing for the USE, including those with coaches, have a very little effect. Theaimof the research was to discuss the validity of the HSE specialists’ arguments concerning the low efficiency of coaching activities.Methodology and research methods. In the course of studying the problem, a comprehensive research methodology was applied, including approaches for comparative and statistical analysis of data and materials published by the HSE, Federal Institute of Pedagogical Measurements (FIPI) and Federal Testing Centre.Results and scientific novelty. An analysis of scientific works published by the HSE specialists showed that their conclusions with regard to the claimed low efficiency of additional lessons in preparation for the USE are unsubstantiated due to the presence of gross methodological errors in the calculations. Firstly, the students’ initial level of knowledge prior to lessons with a coach was miscalculated, with the final school grades in Russian language and mathematics being taken as the initial level instead of the average score of the certificate. Secondly, the specialists ignored the fact that the final grade “two” does not exist in the school attestation system. In this regard, the models used by the HSE specialists’ did not allow the progress in training from the school grade “three” to the USE “three” evaluation to be adequately recognised. Thirdly, the determination of the efficiency of coaching was made without taking the specific character of different teaching disciplines into account. Thus, the reliance on formal mathematical procedures to the detriment of content problem analysis led the specialists of the HSE to snap judgements that do not reflect the true situation.Practical significance.The authors believe that the observations provided in this paper will help education specialists to adjust approaches when determining the efficiency of additional lessons during USE preparation.

Аннотация.Введение. Подведение итогов Единого государственного экзамена традиционно строится на сопоставлении средних баллов по учреж-дениям или территориям, без учета того, что представляет собой в действи-тельности этот индикатор качества образования.Цель статьи -уточнить содержание показателя «средний балл ЕГЭ» на примере результатов федеральных испытаний по математике.Методология и методика исследования. В ходе изучения проблемы приме-нялась методология комплексного исследования, включающая методы сравнитель-ного и статистического анализа данных, публикуемых по итогам проведения ЕГЭ. Проводился также анализ данных, опубликованных специалистами Национального исследовательского университета «Высшая школа экономики» (НИУ ВШЭ).Результаты и их научная новизна. Установлено, что средний балл ЕГЭ по математике в значительной мере определяется особенностями контрольно-измери-тельных материалов, системой начисления баллов, имеющей уравнительный ха-рактер, и результатами тренинга учащихся на решение несложных задач.Практическая значимость. Авторы полагают, что выводы данного ис-следования будут способствовать совершенствованию методики и технологии проведения ЕГЭ.Ключевые слова: итоги ЕГЭ, средний балл ЕГЭ.Для цитирования: Нуриева Л. М., Киселев С. Г. О чем говорит сред-ний балл ЕГЭ? // Образование и наука.