On November 21st and 22nd, the 2nd All-Russian Student Olympiad in Economic Safety was held at the Department of Economic Security of the School of Economics and Management of South Ural State University.
18 teams from 15 different Russian universities participated – not just from the Ural Region, but also from Barnaul, Volgograd, Irkutsk, Moscow, and Perm.
The Olympiad was organized by the Director of the School of Economics and Management Irina Saveleva, and Sergey Ulyanovskiy, General Director of ANO Chelyabinsk Regional Agency for Economic Security and Risk Management.
“Economic security occupies one of the central spaces in the system of national security in Russia. It is a guarantee of the safety of the country, a guarantee of the conditions of stability and effectiveness of public affairs. So keeping track of the tendencies of the economic sector and the appearance of risks and security threats is not only important on the federal and regional levels, but on the level of specific economic subjects, as well,” said Irina Saveleva. “I hope that the participants of the Olympiad are well-prepared and when solving the cases they will consider all of the aspects of economic security in business and develop effective solutions and recommendations to neutralize them.”
The jury of the Olympiad included: Igor Patrushev, General Director of OOO OBiKon Consulting Company; Oleg Petrov, Deputy Director of the Officer Assembly Centre of Economic Security; Irina Danilova, Deputy Director for Research of the SUSU SEM; Anzhelika Karpushkina, Deputy Director for Academic Affairs of the SUSU SEM. The jury also included members of the university’s teaching staff who worked with the participating teams.
"The aim of the Olympiad is to form the competencies of future specialists in economic security. In addition, we don’t just hope that our event will be a boiling point for competitive battles, but that our Olympiad will also be a way to establish cooperation between universities participating in the Olympiad,” said Deputy Director of the SUSU SEM Anzhelika Karpushkina. “During the Olympiad, students demonstrate their scientific developments they completed in the walls of their university and illustrate the ability to solve problem situations related to the economic security of economic entities."
The Olympiad was held in three stages: research, practical, and theoretical stages. In the first stage, participants presented pre-prepared scientific papers from their university. The second stage involved solving cases. In the process of solving a practical issue, the team members had to assess the threats and risks faced by the enterprise specifically named in their case. The last stage was to perform a theoretical task: take tests in a number of disciplines of the economic security field of study.
To comply with the principles of fairness, during the Scientific Competition phase, evaluations by jury members who were employees of the same university as the teams were not taken into account. The evaluation criteria included: elaboration and complexity of the material, the level of presentation, originality and novelty of the abstracts, scientific and practical significance of the projects, and others. During the Case Solving stage, the principle of independence of assessment was observed through the following mechanisms: first, new teams consisting of students from different universities were assembled to solve the case; second, for jury members, the teams’ answers were submitted in encrypted form, hiding the composition of the teams until all the scores were received. The Testing stage was carried out on computers, and the results were processed automatically. At the same time, the names of the participants were also encrypted until the results of the stage were taken into account.
"We came from MIREA – Russian Technological University, in Moscow. We often participate in Olympiads in economics at RUDN University and Plekhanov Russian University of Economics. The Olympiad gives us the opportunity to gain experience: here we solve tests and case studies, plus we pump up communication skills, meet new people, chat, and get to know about the lives of students of other universities. Participation in the Olympiad gives us confidence in our knowledge and competencies. We are interested to see what other participants will present, and to assess whether we will cope with the tasks. But in general, we came to win," shared the participants of the Olympics, Elena Shchetinina and Elizaveta Shaturnaya.
Olympiad Results
Olympiad winners, individual competition:
First place: Elena Kareva (VolSU, Volgograd)
Second place: Artem Volkov (RTU MIREA, Moscow)
Third place: Nadezhda Melnik (SUSU, Chelyabinsk)
Olympiad winners, team competition:
First place: AltSU (Barnaul): Ivan Glubokov, Elena Sennikova.
Second place: VolSU (Volgograd): Elena Kareva, Yulia Rozhnova, Arina Sivkova
Third place: SUSU (Chelyabinsk): Anna Belogrudova, Irina Vshivkova, Nadezhda Melnik.