In the media

In December 2015, a prominent member of Russia’s ruling party was accused of plagiarising a large portion of his economic dissertation. But the strangest thing about the alleged plagiarism is not the accused’s lack of defence—it's that the Russian public didn't really seem to care. In fact, the Chairman of the State is one of more than 1,000 high achieving Russians who have been caught plagiarising. The accused include politicians, judges, prosecutors, police officials and even heads of universities.

The president of the Far Eastern Federal University has been arrested in what could be one of the largest corruption scandals in Russian higher education in the past quarter century. The university, located in Russia’s port city of Vladivostok employs over 3,000 faculty, enrols 33,000 students and has nine branch campuses in the region. The university is the flagship of higher education in the Far East and was intended to become a world-class research university.

Academic ‘scallywags’ are gaining doctorates thanks to the circulation of dodgy theses within some universities, says the founder of plagiarism pressure group. The extraordinary scale of PhD fraud in Russia can be attributed to the reproduction of near-identical doctoral dissertations within universities, with more than 3,500 falsified theses identified by the anti-plagiarism group Dissernet in the past two years.

One in seven Russian students readily admits to cheating in university exams and one in 25 students also reports having paid for someone else to write at least one mid-term or final-year paper, according to the annual Monitoring of Education Markets and Organizations Project (Memo), which received responses from almost 3,000 Russian undergraduates in 2013.

Russia's state education watchdog has added four universities to a list of educational institutions that will be prohibited from enrolling new students from this autumn, the agency said in a statement last week. The addition of two universities in Moscow and two in Dagestan bring the list of educational institutions blacklisted in recent days to 12.

A recent order has fuelled student anger. It is known as: "On the approval of the procedure for the introduction of disciplinary measures for students". Presented by the Ministry of Education and Science, the order allows students to be expelled from universities for the slightest violations of institutions' "codes of ethics" and in particular for participation in political protests and actions.

An international forum has developed a code of ethics to apply to education agents and consultants who recruit international students for universities, colleges and schools around the world. The forum says the code and an accompanying statement of principles it has also published will facilitate a common approach and raise ethical standards in the recruitment of international students by education agents and consultants.

An exposé in the Russian edition of Esquire has roiled education and health officials here by detailing the corruption at six medical schools. The magazine in April published nine short articles by medical students describing the various ways they can pay professors in exchange for passing tests.

A good grade on the new SAT-style exams in Russia costs about 40,000 rubles. Could reform and crackdowns on corruption bring education back from the brink?

The level of corruption in Russian universities is steadily growing despite the efforts of local authorities to eradicate it. According to rough estimates, bribes paid for admission to Russian universities in 2009 totalled $1 billion. This is 40% more than in 2007, with the average bribe rocketing to five times higher in just the last two years.