If school graduate statistics are to be believed, the process of entrance to universities has become more corrupt this year.
Although university entrance campaign has only started on July 15 for Ukraine’s 335,000 school graduates, experts say the campaign has already been affected by a number of schemes running in schools.
Since marks in school certificates are now taken into consideration during the university entrance campaigns, bribing teachers to get better marks and forging school performance journals have become more widespread, experts said.
Moreover, some new rules introduced by the Education Ministry this spring have put university entrants in unequal circumstances, helping the cheaters to succeed, and toughening the rules for hard workers.
“Not everyone was marked objectively, some pupils get higher marks without any logical reason,” complains Yulia, a graduate of School 108 in Kyiv. Her last name was withdrawn because she’s a minor.
“Bribes are here and there in my school, three girls from our school got medals, none of them was fair.”
Tatyana Staruk, head teacher of the same school, was shy to talk about corruption in her educational institution. Instead, she said relationships between school pupils and teachers here were “unique.”
“We have very democratic relationships with pupils. I think we don’t have any corruption. But you should definitely speak to the principle about this,” she advised.
The previous government attempted to start a clean-up of the notoriously corrupt education sector in Ukraine by introducing independent testing for school graduates who wanted to enter universities.
New Education Minister Dmytro Tabachnyk, who was appointed in mid-March, kept the external testing for some types of university entrants, but re-introduced school certificates as part of the evaluation process for potential students.
The marks in school certificates are converted into a quarter of the final university entrance mark, and this share is unfairly high, according to education experts.
Lilia Hrynevych, one of the authors of the independent outside evaluation tests in Ukraine, said this moved corruption down the line back to schools.
“Firstly, it resulted in a hype around the certificate marks. The teachers were put under pressure- everyone wanted to improve their mark,” she says.
“It is possible to buy certificates in schools. Pupils from my class did it. So their marks don’t reflect their knowledge really,” says Dmytro, a graduate of Gimnasium #2 in Mykolaiv. “I myself gave a bribe once. Everyone knew that particular teacher is easy to buy, and his going rate was Hr 50 [for the year’s mark].”
As a result of such practices, statistics of high performing school students improved dramatically this year: the number of gold medalist across the nation soared by more than a third, to 10,855, compared with last year.
To prove there is corruption behind those statistics, the journalistic investigation bureau Svidomo analyzed interviews with teachers in schools across the nation. It turned out that to make a medalist of less-than-excellent pupils, teachers needed to rewrite school tracking journals for the last few years.
Maksym Opanasenko, the author of the investigation, found that the demand on blank school performance tracking journals grew by more than 23 percent this year.
“Both supply and demand for school journals grew by almost 30 percent while the number of school pupils is going down- this is evidence [of corruption] in itself,” says Opanasenko. “Moreover, this year schools were buying journals themselves, without any control on behalf of the Education Ministry.”
Reintroduction of school certificates in university evaluation process has put many pupils in unequal circumstances, says Hrynevych. “It was much harder for the pupils of the specialized schools, gymnasiums, colleges , where education standards are higher, to graduate with high marks than for their peers from ordinary schools,” she said.
Ihor Likarchuk, head of the Center of the Independent External Evaluation, says school certificates should once again be dropped from university evaluation process.
“They don’t reflect the real attitude of the pupil to studying. The average mark …is totally subjective. Moreover, gold medalists often don’t show high education level on the tests,” he says.
Another novelty of this year’s entrance campaign is that those who want to do evening classes in universities, or do a correspondence course, did not need to set an independent exam after school at all if they graduated in 2007 or earlier.
Just a couple of years ago the Ministry of Education and Science would have taken the university’s license for following such an entrance procedure, but this year it’s official.
Nastya Klukovska, advisor to former Education Minister Ivan Vakarchuk, says that apart from the obvious implications of corruption, the new procedure also raises psychological and philosophical issues.
“Entrance to the university is a challenge,” she says. “If money or relationships are used, entrance stops being a trial. It fails to train adult and conscious Ukrainians.”
But Iryna Kostevska, head of the press department at the Education Ministry, says the ministry thinks it’s on the right track with all of its novelties. “What do you expect us to comment on? All these changes were made with the initiative of Education Ministry and turned into law,” she said.
Kyiv Post staff writer Elena Zagrebina can be reached at [email protected].
