Russia
Cracking Down on Entrance-Exam Fraud
After pilot programs in regions of the country, Russia introduced a nationwide university entrance exam this year in hopes of reducing bribery and other forms of corruption that have become ingrained in the college admissions process. In October, however, the minister of science and education announced that several regional administrators of the exam had been fired because they themselves were corrupt.
The dismissals came after the ministry began receiving complaints from universities about student performance and from parents about bureaucrats asking for bribes. Moscow State University [1], Russia’s premier institution and one of the biggest critics of the Uniform State Exam, as the test is known, retested first-year students enrolled in its schools of mathematics and computer science. About 60 percent of the students failed the same exam they had supposedly passed during the admissions process, said Victor Sadovnichy, rector of Moscow State.
Early this summer, the education-inspection service reported that regional test administrators were falsifying high scores for students on the Uniform State Exam. Questionable results included perfect scores by many students in southern Russia. A spokesman for Andrei Fursenko, the education minister, said that an exam organizer in the Voronezh region, in southwestern Russia, had been fired, and that others would also lose their positions.
– The Chronicle of Higher Education [2]
October 1, 2009
New MBA Program Confronts Corruption
Some of Russia’s leading names in business have created an MBA program that deals with issues directly related to bribery, bureaucracy and flawed laws, according to the Associated Press. Supporters of the Moscow School of Management [3] say it will fill an important niche by getting students ready for the unpredictable, sometimes corrupt world of emerging market economies.
“We’d like to change the whole model,” says Dean Wilfried Vanhonacker. “It doesn’t make sense for us, nor are we interested in competing with Harvard [4]. That’s a business school of the past, I have to say. But a business school of the future has to be different.”
With construction not quite finished on its US$250 million glass-and-steel campus just outside Moscow’s city limits, the school recently launched its full-time, 16-month MBA program – with classes temporarily in the five-star Baltschug Kempinski hotel near the Kremlin.
– Associated Press [5]
September 30, 3009
12 Universities Chosen as National Research Universities
Twelve universities were chosen in October to receive the status of national research universities after a contest organized by the Russian Ministry of Education and Science [6]. The 12 institutions chosen from a total of 28 finalists will receive additional state financing from the federal budget to develop particular ‘development programs’. Universities will receive 1.8 billion rubles in the five-year period 2009-2013. This status is given for a term of 10 years.
The following institutions were chosen:
- The Higher School of Economics [7]
- Tupolev Kazan State Technical University [8]
- Moscow Aviation Institute [9] (State Technical University)
- Bauman Moscow State Technical University [10]
- Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology [11] (State University)
- Lobachevsky Nizhny Novgorod State University [12]
- Novosibirsk State University [13]
- Perm State Technical University [14]
- Korolev Samara State Aerospace University [15]
- Plekhanov Saint Petersburg State Mining Institute [16]
- Saint Petersburg State University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics [17]
- Tomsk Polytechnic University [18]
– Higher School of Economics news release [19]
October 7, 2009
Major Russian Universities Clarifies Rules on Overseas Scholarly Presentations
Faculty members at Russia’s St. Petersburg State University [20] were notified in October that they would be required to submit their scholarly work to administrators for approval to publish it abroad or present it at foreign conferences, according to an order described in the New York Times. After objections from scholars, authorities at the university issued a statement of clarification in November announcing that researchers in the humanities and social sciences would be exempt from the screening.
Administrators said originally that the measure was designed to protect Russia’s intellectual property and national security. They also stated that they were simply bringing the university into line with Russia’s 1999 law on export control, passed after a decade in which some impoverished scientists sold strategic technology to foreign customers. But a number of professors complained that the move could herald a new wave of academic censorship akin to Soviet-era restrictions, and said they expected certain outspoken colleagues might be the targets of the new rules.
The university’s follow-up statement explained that the export-control procedures applied only to research involving “dual-use technology,” nonmilitary techniques that could have military applications.
– New York Times [21]
October 27, 2009
– New York Times [22]
November 2, 2009
Turkmenistan
Government Moves Against U.S. Organizations and Study Abroad Opportunities
In September, 50 Turkmen students were refused permission to travel abroad to continue their studies at the American University of Central Asia [23] in Kyrgyzstan, which offers a U.S.-style liberal-arts education. Their enrollment was subsequently transferred to a similar institution, the American University of Bulgaria [24]. But earlier in October, those students were not allowed to board planes to Bulgaria, leading the U.S. Embassy in the capital Ashgabat to issue a statement on October 5 expressing its dismay over “Turkmenistan’s continued denial of freedom of movement for…Turkmen students.”
Since then, Ashgabat has denied entry to nearly 50 volunteers for the U.S.-government run Peace Corps, whose work in Turkmenistan primarily involves health care and English-language education. The government has provided no official explanation for the moves, and the Education Ministry declined to respond to questions from U.S. journalists regarding the university students.
But some observers regard the developments as a sign that authorities in the reclusive country remain wary of Western-style education, and say they raise questions about President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov’s commitment to open up to the outside world after years of isolation under his predecessor, the late Saparmurat Niyazov.
This year an estimated 2,700 students enrolled to study at universities in Russia, Europe, and the United States, as well as in East Asian countries under a government-funded education project.
– RFE/RL [25]
October 13, 2009