Ukrainian citizens have increasingly begun to travel abroad for educational purposes. Many go to study at foreign universities. Education at UK universities is considered prestigious throughout the world. It is quite difficult for a foreign student to start studying immediately. This requires preliminary preparation. There are several ways that can simplify the admission procedure itself and prepare a future freshman for university studies.
The main difference in the admission systems of Ukrainian and British universities is that we have a system of entrance exams, while they have a competition of documents. For a Ukrainian applicant, the main thing is to pass entrance exams brilliantly. In the UK, high school graduates send their documents to universities they like in advance, and then admissions committees, having studied the quality of the secondary education diploma, decide whether to accept a particular candidate or not.
British higher education institutions are not ready to recognize our certificate as equivalent to theirs. And it's not just that our secondary education is designed for 11 years, while in the UK it is 12. The domestic school does not recognize specialization (core subjects for in-depth study), while in England it must be chosen at least two years before finishing school. And if a high school student has chosen, say, a humanities direction, which implies studying a certain set of disciplines, he will no longer be able to apply for engineering specialties, and vice versa.
But if there were no way out of this situation, thousands of our girls and boys would not be studying in Western universities today. How did they manage it?
One option is this: send a child abroad to the senior grades of secondary school to obtain a British certificate. For foreign students (if their parents do not live in the country), only private boarding schools are open. To obtain a national certificate, it is enough to study for two years.
The stage of compulsory education in the UK ends at ages 15-16 with passing exams for a certificate of secondary education - General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE). But this is not enough for admission to a university. Future students study for another two years in senior school (this stage is called Sixth Form) under the A-level program, where within the chosen specialty they study three to six subjects in depth. A-level exam results are a kind of certificate competition and allow both Britons and foreigners to enter universities on equal terms.
For enrollment, it is necessary to submit a report card with grades from one's home school for the last year or two, pass exams in English language proficiency and in core subjects. In some cases, this can be done without going abroad, at the office of an educational agency. Sometimes an interview in the UK is required.
Also popular way of 'penetrating' British universities has become preparatory departments for foreign students, called Foundation (from English 'foundation'). In the vast majority of cases, study on this program lasts one year, although there are both one-and-a-half-year and shortened six-month programs.
What does the Foundation program consist of? First of all, it necessarily includes language training. As a rule, this is an intensive language course for academic purposes, that is, involving the study of special vocabulary.
The second component is mastering study skills. Students are trained to take notes on lectures in English, work with textbooks, write essays and reports, participate in compiling group projects. The third component is the study of three or four specialized subjects of the student's choice at the level of final school grades. This prepares him for exams and reduces the gap in knowledge level.
When choosing subjects, it is important to already decide which faculty the student will apply to. Many of the tricks that Ukrainian students learn in the Foundation program cannot be mastered at home. Take, for example, the technique of taking a written test with multiple answer options. Someone who has mastered it knows how much time should be spent on completing certain assignments, how to properly format finished work, etc. As a result, with an objectively equal level of knowledge, a prepared person will show better results than an unprepared one.
Or, say, the technique of independent work. It is known that the Western education system involves a much larger workload than the domestic one. And the ability to quickly and effectively work with large volumes of texts, competently compile and summarize sources, and present one's conclusions and considerations is of great importance for academic performance. While studying on Foundation courses, students also practice giving oral presentations to an audience, calculating the necessary time for this, and answering tricky questions without getting confused. Do they teach this in our school?
In teaching English, the emphasis is on mastering the skills of competent written speech. Indeed, learning to speak English fluently is not such a difficult task. But being able to write not just without gross spelling errors, but constructing each phrase on the basis of internal linguistic logic, using the full richness of the English language and without violating stylistic norms - and this is exactly what is required from a university student - will be more difficult. Program participants learn all this deliberately.
The Foundation program starts two, and in some cases, four times a year. Preliminary acquaintance is advisable to begin two or three months before the start of the program.
Oksana RUSSAKOVSKAYA,
company "Ukrtechintur".