Russian Blog
This is a blog by JustRussian about learning Russian. You will find useful tips for learning Russian, Russian courses available in London, information about Russian culture and links to websites with information for students of Russian.
Russian education: higher school.
By Vlada 29 April 08
More stories from a Russian teacher in London, or things you may be interested to know but won’t learn in a Russian course.
Two students meet: “Oh my God! We’ve been told we’ll have to learn Chinese!!” – “Hold on, don’t panic, when is the exam?”
That joke pretty much sums up students’ life… Fun, stress, short periods of hard work and long holidays! Oh, how stupid we were to be wanting to graduate and go to work!
So, what defines students’ life in Russia?
Entering a university
Until recently, there were entrance exams in all colleges (“instituty”- now all called “universitety”) and universities, traditionally in the Russian language, history and two other subjects, according to the specialisation of the faculty. One or two of the exams were written, and the rest oral (a presentation in front of a panel of teachers). In the last couple of years, a new system has been introduced – the so called “unified” final school exam, the score from which is used instead of the entrance exams. Moscow university (the biggest and the most prestigious university in the country) has resisted this system (rightly, in my opinion!) until this year, but now the “unified” exam will count towards the score at the entrance exams (although will not replace them) even in the Alma Mater itself of Russian higher education. Some faculties of Moscow University are notoriously difficult to enter. The competition is tough, so the entrance exams are designed to filter the applicants and accept the ones with the highest score. When I entered the Faculty of Philology in 1985, the competition was something like 9 or 10 people per place, and was not the highest on record!
The cost of education
Higher education is free for all citizens of the Russian Federation. Moreover, students are given “stipends” – little salaries which can be scrapped in case of bad academic performance. You can’t live on it, but it’s better than nothing.
With the advance of the market economy, however, many universities have opened fee-paying departments, and some fee-paying private colleges have appeared. The standard of education there can be lower, paradoxically, than in free state universities, but they are easy to enter, since they operate on a commercial basis.
Having said that education is officially free, I should however mention that in order to enter Moscow University I had to have private lessons with university tutors for 2 years, because of the huge gap between the school curriculum and the university entrance requirements. So my parents paid a lot of money to give me a chance to enter the university of my choice. Does it count towards the cost of higher education? Strictly speaking, I could get a less prestigious place without having the additional tuition.
The structure of education
A typical course of higher education in Russia lasts 5 years (6 years for doctors). So the degree that Russian graduates get corresponds to the British Master’s degree. There is generally no equivalent of the Bachelor’s degree. Some colleges have recently introduced shorter Bachelor’s courses, to follow the Western fashion, but it is still rare.
At the end of the course of study, a graduate has to “support a thesis” (“zashitit’ diplom”), which is a rather scary procedure involving presenting your graduation paper to a board of teachers who ask questions and give a final grade. Those who get an excellent grade get the red-coloured certificate of a university degree (corresponding to the British “honours” degree) and those with lower grades get a blue one.
Those who don’t want to leave the university after five years (yes, there are enthusiasts of this kind!) can stay on for another 2 years of full time postgraduate studies (“aspirantura”), provided they have been good students all along, and present a PhD thesis at the end, thus becoming a “kandidat nauk”, or a Doctor of whatever science or humanity they have studied.
Learning in Russia is still respected (just about…) and the postgraduates, as well as university teachers, can make a decent living out of giving private lessons, the most expensive of those are language lessons, including Russian.
Students’ life
Most students live at home, because most of them go to the local colleges and universities. Free places in the halls of residence are given to students who come from other towns/places. Moscow University’s halls of residence used to be a jolly place (I am sure it still is!), full of parties and gossip, with philosophy students regularly falling out of the 20th floor windows, after speculating about the meaning of life too much…
Being a muscovite, I was a “home” girl, and only visited the halls of residence to see my friends, who usually suffered from severe lack of sleep and no home dinners (whereas I didn’t have the freedom!)
Whatever your lifestyle is, as a full-time student you have to be at University every day and sit in lectures and seminars, and do the homework. Being expelled is quite possible, for bad grades and absences.
Each year is divided into groups who have most of the lessons together. During the semester, each group has:
•Lectures – given usually for the whole year in a big lecture room;
•Seminars – in a group of 10-20 people, where you are supposed to interact with the tutor;
•Colloquiums (colloquia) – same as seminars but with students answering the teacher’s questions;
•“Zachyoty” – exams without a mark, just “pass” or “fail”;
•Exams at the end of semester/year.
Summer holidays are long, from June to September, in June some students are required to do “practical work” (“praktika”) which usually consists of hanging around the building, shuffling papers in the administrative office or doing something clearly not related to your future qualification.
The exam periods at the end of a semester (in December-January and in May-June) are crazy times. We had several exams and tests, mostly oral ones, in each semester, with hundreds of exam questions and thousands of pages of literature to read, especially in literature courses. So it was our usual practice to get together in a group and divide the question list, so that one student prepares cheat-sheets and shares information on certain questions (so that you do 20 questions rather than 100). Talk about a team building exercise! Cheating was elaborate (with special devices like secret pockets and specially constructed clothes) and inevitable, because no human mind could embrace the amount of information we were required to know. So who knows how we turned out to be quite well-educated people…