A student who was caught cheating on a state exam has managed to get into a top Russian university, despite an admission ban from the education minister himself.
The cheating scandal broke out in the middle of June, when eight students from leading technical institutes were caught taking math exams for graduating students.
The impersonators were expelled and the exam results annulled, but as journalists found out, the students were allowed to retake the exam after their parents pointed out there was no legislation in place to prohibit the students from retaking the exam.
One of them was caught cheating again, while the others got fairly unimpressive grades. Still, a low grade in math was enough for one of them to get into a top medical school.
Apparently he managed to score a perfect 100 in the hardest chemistry exam.
This is not the first scandal surrounding this year’s graduation exams. The head of Russia’s leading medical school was fired after a young IT specialist busted a corruption scheme used to help “wanted” students enter the institute.
The young man found out that more than 75 percent of the university’s applicants were “dead souls” with fake state exam certificates.
Those “students” entered the university straightaway within the so-called first wave of applicants – the ones with the highest exam scores.
Other students who had lower scores saw that there was no chance of entering the university and left the competition. In doing so, they cleared the way for students who had lower scores but had paid bribes to university administrators.
Earlier it was alleged that more than 20,000 graduating students used the social networking website Vkontakte to share exam answers.
As the state exams are taken throughout Russia at the same time in every single region of the country, students in Moscow or St. Petersburg had many hours to read what questions were going to be asked and to get ready for the test.
The Unified State Exam has long been subject to heated debate. The fact that it is a multiple-choice exam, unlike the oral and written exams of previous years, has raised questions about whether it is the right way to test students.