IDENTIFICATION OF THE DEGREE OF SIMILARITY OF EDUCATIONAL SPECIALTIES ON THE BASE OF THE ANALYSIS OF THE NAHEQA EXPERTS PROFILES

Abstract

Academic community continues to discuss the expediency of combining specialties, belonging of various specialties to one branch of knowledge, etc. For substantiation of such solutions, it is important to have valid assessments of the similarity level of the specialties. Such assessments are necessary for correct organization of the competition for distribution of the state-budget places, merging of universities, formation of interdisciplinary educational programs, establishment of the correspondence of the teacher to education components, selection of the reviewers for the expert examination of the dissertations, manuscripts of the papers, grant applications. The paper suggests the method of identification of the similarity level of education specialties according to the register of NAHEQA experts. The method is based on the assumption that the ability of NAHEQA expert to assess the quality of education programs on different specialties is the indicator of the similarity of these specialties. The level of similarity is evaluated by Jaccard index. On the base NAHEQA registers data base of 4245 experts is formed, 2414 of them are experts in one specialty, 1361 are experts in two specialties and 470 are experts in three specialties. Identification of the similarity level of specialties is carried out. Greater part of 7260 pairs of specialties have almost zero similarity. Average level of similarity is determined for 52 pairs of specialties and 21 pair has high level of similarity. It should be noted that 9 out of 21 pairs with high similarity form specialties in different branches of knowledge. Thus, it was established that common branch profile is not identical to real similarity of the specialties. It is shown on the specific examples how to use the obtained results for substantiation of the managerial decisions regarding the launching of inter-disciplinary educational programs, merging specialties, shifting specialties into other branches of knowledge and for the formation of the groups of specialties for wide contest.