Exam Fever in Russia

In city, town and village across the vast plains, students last week burned the midnight oil as they crammed for university entrance exams. Providing moral support, their parents besieged admissions officers with pleading telegrams, desperately sought out the help of influential friends in politics or government. Doctors suddenly found themselves busy trying to stamp out an epidemic of youthful exhaustion and nervous tension.

Far worse than the admissions crush at the Ivies or Oxbridge, so it seems, is the placement struggle currently taking place in that self-styled educational paradise, the Soviet Union. Although Russia claims to spare no rubles when it comes to schooling, its universities and technical institutes are sadly inadequate to meet the national demand.

This year, for example, only 434,000 freshmen can be admitted to the nation's institutes of higher learning. The number of high school graduates is more than 2,700,000, twice last year's record total. In part, the sudden increase reflects the coming to maturity of a postwar baby crop, but much of it is due to one of Nikita Khrushchev's colossal mistakes. In 1958 he decreed that high school students must work two days a week in factories, which meant adding an eleventh year to the curriculum. Factory managers complained that the students were a liability not an asset. So two years ago, Russia scrapped the system and went back to the old ten-year plan--with the result that this spring not one but two grades reached graduation.

Even at the best of times, the Soviet student faces the kind of admissions ordeal that makes getting into Harvard seem as easy as signing up for first grade in public school. Most university candidates sweat through ten or more zachety, or trial tests, before being allowed to take the major exams given by the government during June and July. Moreover, even a top grade is no guarantee of admission. Students with some factory or military experience have an edge in the selection; so especially have those with a well-placed friend in the party apparatus.

A university diploma, as every Soviet schoolboy knows, is an essential passport to a white-collar job and ultimate success. Inevitably, the competition for college has led to a displeasing amount of corruption. This spring, reported Komsomolskaya Pravda, 32 students were expelled from the Armenian state university in Erivan when authorities discovered that they had gained their admission through political influence and faked records, and had not passed a single entrance test.

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