Dagestan a Leader in Education Tourism

MOSCOW — Dagestan, a republic in the Caucasus region, has been in the news in recent years as a battlefield in the guerrilla war conducted by Chechen separatists since 2000. The Volgograd bombings in December, ahead of the Winter Olympic games in Sochi, have raised regional security concerns to a new pitch. But in the past year Dagestan has also been in the spotlight for something quite different — a worsening form of corruption known as education tourism.

All students in Russia must pass the Unified State Exam on graduation from high school to qualify for entry to any university or professional college. The U.S.E. is designed to give students from all regions of the country equal access to higher education.

Introduced in 2001, it became the sole accepted form of examination in Russian high schools in 2009. But since then it has come under increasing scrutiny amid allegations of widespread corruption and violations of exam regulations.

A U.S.E. tourist is a final-year student who transfers from a big city school to one in a remote rural area where school officials may take a more relaxed approach to exam regulations — and where the cost of bribery may be lower.

According to the Russian Federal Education and Science Supervision Service, or Rosobrnadzor, 1,500 students transferred last year from schools in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, to rural schools in neighboring villages.

Anton, who asked not to be fully identified for fear of repercussions, said he was one of those students. Now in his first year at a technical university in St. Petersburg, he said he had transferred from a school in Makhachkala to one about 30 kilometers, or 20 miles, north of the city, where passing the exam would be easier.

“I was struggling in school, I knew that if I wanted to get into university I would have to have something extra,” he said in a recent interview. “It cost too much to organize anything in my hometown, so the only option I had was to transfer to a school in a small village.”

In Makhachkala, Anton said, paying a teacher to take a copy of the exam paper out of the classroom would have cost 15,000 rubles, or $425, and another 20,000 rubles to bring it back in: In a rural school, he added, the price rarely goes higher than 3,000 rubles.

“I had to pay the teacher supervising the exam 2,000 rubles,” he said. “Once the exam started, she took a copy out of the class and gave it to one of my friends who researched the answers on his phone. Half an hour later she went out again, got his copy and put it on my desk.”

Anton’s story is not unique. After last year’s exams, amateur videos were posted on YouTube and VKontakte, a Russian social media website, reportedly showing students dropping exam papers from classroom windows to helpers waiting below, armed with books and mobile phones.

Masha, a recent high school graduate from one of Dagestan’s northern regions, who also asked not to be identified, said she had witnessed cheating, sometimes with the collusion of teachers.

“All year long teachers were trying to scare us, telling us that mobile phones would not be allowed, there would be cameras in the classroom and anyone caught cheating would automatically fail,” she said. “But there was nothing of the sort: Parents would pay the teachers a few thousand so that they would take exam copies out of the room; some students were throwing their work out of the window, others were speaking freely on their phones. In some cases, even, the exam supervisors would help.”

Widespread reports of violations have made the curbing of exam corruption a priority for the Dagestan government.

Arthur Dalgatov, the republic’s minister of education and science, issued an open letter in September, insisting that education establishments should not allow students to transfer to different schools without a specified reason.

“School administrations should do everything in their power to prevent students from senior classes transferring to rural schools, if the transfer is not a result of their family moving,” the letter said.

Meanwhile, a growing number of Russian universities are petitioning to be allowed to reinstate their own entry examinations to help screen out fraudulently qualified students.

Some have already succeeded, including Moscow State University and St. Petersburg State University.

“To us, a student’s U.S.E. score does not play a significant role; if they want to study at our university they have to pass an entry exam in the subject that they plan on pursuing a degree in,” said Yelena Vartanova, dean of the journalism faculty at Moscow State. “For example, to get accepted to the journalism course a student has to go through a creative writing competition.”

But the process is slow: Since 2009 fewer than 30 universities, out of more than 100 that have asked, have been granted the right to set their own entry exams.

While U.S.E. tourism is the most talked about problem with Russia’s exam system, it is not the only one. In November, a Rosobrnadzor statement put the estimated number of violations last year at 1,500, double the number in 2012. In addition to tourism and bribery, reported violations included the publication of exam papers on social media sites.

Some teachers now argue that the best solution would be to abolish the unified exam altogether.

Irina Igorevna, a U.S.E. tutor and former teacher of Russian at a secondary school in Moscow, says that leaving aside the corruption issue, it does not adequately prepare students for university.

“Students spend two years being taught how to answer multiple-choice questions,” she said. “Most of them have never written a proper essay, so they face significant difficulties once they get into university, regardless of whether or not they bought their results.”

Dagestan a Leader in Education Tourism