Examination malpractice and resigned tolerance thereof is by no means an exclusively Indian phenomenon. One in seven Russian students readily admits to cheating in university exams, reveals a national poll of undergraduates.
One in 25 students reports having paid someone else to write at least one mid-term or final-year paper, according to the annual Monitoring of Education Markets and Organisations Project (Memo), which received responses from 3,000 Russian undergraduates in 2013.
The project confirms the widespread belief that “cheating is blossoming” in Russian universities, says Igor Chirikov, senior research fellow at the Institute of Education at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow (HSE), which conducted the poll. Even those who don’t admit to cheating have a high tolerance for academic dishonesty, with half of students in economics and management, questioned for a separate survey, stating that cheats should receive no more than a caution if caught, says Dr. Chirikov, who also works at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley.
“These expectations correspond to the actual behaviour of faculty members,” he writes in a journal article detailing the findings. According to a parallel Memo survey of academics, “the majority of them usually just give cheaters a warning or lower the grade”, says Chirikov.
With few Russian universities tackling plagiarism and other forms of academic dishonesty at the institutional level, “cheating is blossoming both among students and faculty and reinforcing corruption practices outside academia”, he warns.
While acknowledging that the wider acceptance of corruption in Russian society has contributed to the phenomenon, Dr. Chirikov also speculates that “cheating has become a response to boring and meaningless education”. “Students cheat when they are cheated,” argues Chirikov, whose claims are published in a paper titled The Mystery of Russian Students: Poor Learning Experience, High Satisfaction in the spring edition of the HSE journal Higher Education in Russia and Beyond.
The paper says data from a 2013 poll of over 4,000 economics and management undergraduates at 11 leading Russian universities indicates that 70 percent of students spend most of their time in class writing down what a lecturer says. Students in Russia are “rarely challenged intellectually” and “do not engage much in creative and intellectually challenging activities”, says Chirikov.
(Excerpted and adapted from )