I Did Not Expect This

I did not expect this from RANEPA :(

I recently wrote that, as a RANEPA master’s student, I have access to many continuing and additional professional education programmes under Priority 2030. In the comments, Mikhail Karelin, Chief Commercial Officer and I were surprised by the huge number of accounting and legal programmes. I managed to find two that were at least somewhat related to IT.

I have now completed one of them, and I want to share my conclusions.

The programme is divided into seven topics, each with five, six or seven lessons. Every lesson is a video in which a speaker talks alongside a presentation.

The first two topics were not too bad: the lecturer covered some basics about information systems, which collect information, process it and present results. Fair enough.

From the third topic onward, things became bizarre. A completely different lecturer started explaining how hard life is for lawyers: they must conduct legal audits and reviews, give legal advice, and much more. To make their lives easier, there are information systems for them. That was the whole topic.

It got even better after that. The following topics covered digital transformation, blockchain, crowdfunding and court-work automation. They all followed the same pattern.

It went something like this: “Now we will consider a concept such as, for example, blockchain. Law No. such-and-such, dated such-and-such, contains one definition; decree No. such-and-such contains another classification; order No. such-and-such establishes a certain liability, and so on.”

The person reading extracts from these documents did not understand what they were reading at all. Every time the phrase “distributed ledger” appeared, they read it as “distributive ledger”. Seriously? You just want to ask: what exactly is that ledger distributing?

At the end of each topic and the course as a whole, we had to take a test and answer 45% of the questions correctly. The questions could roughly be divided into two parts:

• Technical questions, where a little logic was enough to find the right answer (see the photo);
• Legal questions. No comment (see the other photos).

I was so disappointed by this approach that I did not even Google the answers to the legal questions. The answers to the technical ones were more than enough for me to pass the tests with a large margin.

Overall, this course was clearly made by lawyers who did not look too deeply into the subject. It is good that I did not pay for it—or rather, that we all paid for it from our taxes. I have just two questions:

• Will the digital-transformation course be the same?
• Surely some people who take this course will want to get into IT, since all you need is to know the numbers of laws and money can be made hand over fist.