Principles of the "regulatory guillotine" and methods of computational law used to analyze the requirements for the quality of higher education

Abstract

Now Russia is undergoing a reform of the control and supervisory activity of the “regulatory guillotine”, which is designed to significantly reduce the number of mandatory requirements in the legislation, leaving only those that are necessary and should be controlled among them. In the presented article, the principles of this reform are applied to the Federal State Educational Standards (FSES). Russian legislation understands the quality of education as compliance with these standards, but their number is extremely large, which previously made it difficult to systematically study them. However, the application of methods of computational jurisprudence made it possible to analyze one of the sections “Conditions for the implementation of the program” for 720 FSES of higher education (specialist’s, bachelor’s, and master's). The computer program generated a “generalized summary” of texts without loss of content (for all federal state educational standards of each level of education). In it, duplicated and similar fragments were combined, differences and variations in wording, noted and visualized. The volume of analysis has decreased by more than 35 times, and an expert assessment of all the requirements of the Federal State Educational Standard became possible. Previously, this method has not been used in computational jurisprudence.

As a result, the original tens of thousands of requirements of the Federal State Educational Standard were divided into four categories, three of which are recommended for exclusion (for appropriate reasons), the rest is “mandatory requirements”. These 5 generalized universal requirements are suitable for use in control and supervision activities, and liability can be established for their violation.