Network Communities and Groups in the Preparation for the Unified State Exam

This work presents an analysis of the intersection of users between the schools communities in Kazan and the English language Unified State Exam (USE) preparation group on the VKontakte social network. The study is based on the calculation of the normalized rank of the user community according to a formula, which is equal to the order of the community’s representation on its VKontakte page: the lower the rank is, the later the user visits this community. Using a proprietary script in the Python programming language, data parsing was conducted from the official community on the VKontakte network. We selected 123 schools in Kazan that have official groups on VKontakte. Then we identified community members who are simultaneously in the Kazan school group and in the group for USE English language preparation. The results of the analysis show that users who were simultaneously in the official groups of Kazan schools on VKontakte and the USE English language preparation group are mainly categorized as school teachers and English tutors. This study may be useful for schools and other educational organizations to analyze the people in their traditional social networks.