St Petersburg University among the top three Russian universities in 15 RAEX subject rankings
St Petersburg University has made it into the top three in 15 subject rankings published by the RAEX agency, and has once again taken first place among all Russian higher education institutions in the subject area of law.
This year’s lists of the best universities included 170 higher education institutions from 43 regions of Russia. There are 36 subject areas in the ranking, and the University was included in the top three in 15 of them. St Petersburg University took the first place in Law.
The Faculty of Law of St Petersburg University is the oldest law faculty in the country and the place where legal education began. This year, the University is enrolling students in three bachelor’s and 20 master’s programmes in law. Among them, for example, are the following: "Laws (with Advanced Study of the Chinese Language and the Law of the PRC)"; "Lawyer in the Field of Sports Law"; and "Lawyer in the Field of Norm-Setting" to name just a few.
Since 1998, the Legal Clinic has been part of St Petersburg University. Students provide free legal advice and draft legal documents there. This approach enables students to gain experience of working with real cases and real clients while still studying. Additionally, as part of the Monitoring Law Enforcement project, all law students study how laws are understood and interpreted by law enforcers, i.e. courts and government agencies. St Petersburg University also hosts the annual International Youth Legal Forum.
The University was ranked second in nine subject areas, including Biology, Geography, History and Archaeology, Linguistics and Foreign Languages, Mathematics, Political Science and International Relations, Chemistry, Ecology, and Hospitality. St Petersburg University was also in the top three in subjects such as Management, Psychology, Sociology, Physics, Philology, and Journalism. It also improved its performance in Information Technology, moving up one place, and retained its fourth place in medicine, ahead of some of the more specialised universities on the list.
To compile the ranking, a panel of experts evaluates which universities provide the best education for students in each of the selected fields, taking into account the university’s contribution to social development. In order to assess the university’s first mission — education — they look at the quality of students’ education, the results of students’ performances in Russian Olympiads, the number of mass online courses, and other factors.
Today, St Petersburg University is the only Russian educational institution that is a co-founder of the Global Alliance of Massive Open Online Courses and a co-founder of the Open Education online platform. The number of St Petersburg University’s online courses currently exceeds 500, with a total audience of over 4,000,000 students throughout the world. At the same time, St Petersburg University is the first university in Russia whose courses are hosted on China’s largest national online education platform XuetangX.
To assess the second — scientific — mission of universities, the ranking compilers study the publications of university staff and the number of citations, the number of dissertations defended and the total amount spent on research activities.
St Petersburg University is entitled to award its own academic degrees and conduct defences of dissertations according to its own terms. The Publishing House of St Petersburg University has recently published a book entitled ’Academic degrees of St Petersburg University: history, modernity, prospects’, which describes the main features and advantages of the terms at St Petersburg University. The publication is illustrated with cases of specific defences and interviews with those who have defended their degrees.
In order to solve the key tasks of science and research, St Petersburg University has created the Research Park, i.e. a unique free access centre, which unites 22 resource centres and is today unique in Russia and the world in terms of equipment and technological capabilities.
In assessing the third — public or social — mission of universities, the contribution of universities to the training of personnel for the region, the level of demand for graduates, the proportion of first-year students from other regions and other indicators were taken into account. At present, the University has more than 27,000 students from different regions of Russia and more than 120 countries. The University offers more than 500 degree programmes, and the number of non-degree programmes and advanced training programmes exceeds 800.