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Since taking over the Kremlin last month, President Medvedev, has made it a priority to combat what he calls "legal nihilism" in Russia. A campaign has begun to clean the courts of bribe-taking judges and letters from members of the public, complaining about corruption, have been published on the Kremlin website. Reporting on the results at St. Petersburg, the daily Kommersant said that 83 out of 200 students in the law faculty had failed their state examinations. Some who had received grade 2, the lowest mark, had been expecting to leave with "red diplomas" or distinctions. Among those who failed were students who had paid fees.

According to a study published in the February issue of the Comparative Education Review, educational corruption in the former USSR and other former communist regimes has increased since the end of the Cold War. Among the immediate problems for students is that a devalued degree adversely affects their earning power. Devaluation of degrees has serious international policy implications, degrades the entire social system of those countries and decreases the likelihood that those graduates will be able to improve their economic standing.

To reduce the use of bribes, the parliament has approved a nationwide, standardized multiple choice test for high school seniors. This would substitute for written and oral admission exams that now leave room for subjective grading – and bribes. The testing requirement is expected to come into force in 2009.

According to a report made by the public chamber, corruption is so widespread that it could threaten political stability in the country. Analysts say the scale of corruption is in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Bribes are a daily drain on Russian Federation - who pay from a few dollars for traffic infringements to thousands of dollars to ensure a good education for their child.

According to Izvestiya Nauki, a corruption-monitoring team at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, university teachers took roughly $923 million in 2004. Some estimates indicate that corruption in universities is rising by 7-10 percent annually. The Highest School of Economics believes one out of ten university lecturers take bribes, and 20% of future students and their parents would be prepared to offer a bribe.

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.

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.