Idiots abound:
For years, Ukraine’s once vaunted Soviet education system has deteriorated, with corruption taking a toll on the quality of education. Plagiarism is widespread and often goes unpunished, while bribes are often accepted to purchase grades, to pass exams and even to buy diplomas. Several Middle Eastern countries, including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, no longer recognize Ukrainian medical diplomas because of the sub-grade qualification level of graduates. The U.S. also doesn’t recognize Ukrainian medical degrees.
The author of this piece creates an impression that this corruption and deterioration happened after the fall of the USSR which is a vicious lie. I already shared on the blog how the graduates of the “vaunted Soviet education system” tortured me back in the early 1980s when I sought medical help as a very small child. The entire “vaunted Soviet education system” was predicated on corruption, bribery, plagiarism, and meaningless diplomas. Jeez, people, read Solzhenitsyn for a description of how garbagey Soviet diplomas were even back in the 1940s. And it only went downhill after that.
Of course, higher education in Ukraine and Russia sucks something fierce. But that suckiness was inherited from the Soviet times.
Clarissa's Blog 
There are a couple of areas where Soviet education was pretty good compared to what exists in the post-Soviet states today. These were Russian and other language instruction (although this was not true for all languages at all level) and basic mathematics. My wife constantly laments how the quality of Russian language instruction has completely collapsed in the Kyrgyz school her eldest daughter attends. As far as Kyrgyz medical degrees go, Russia does not even recognize them. Although for some reason India does and there are thousands of Indian medical students in Bishkek.
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Russian and Ukrainian medical degrees aren’t and shouldn’t be recognized anywhere because they are a joke.
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I don’t know what India is thinking.
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“Although for some reason India does and there are thousands of Indian medical students in Bishkek”
Even before googling it I had deduced that this was program in English, quite possibly a diploma mill. That the home page says “English medium” indicates they’re probably targetting Indians.
There are a few diploma mills operating in Poland now bringing in Indians (and/or others from South Asia). Mostly I have the idea they’re trying to make their way west (especially towards the UK).
More generally a bunch of European universities are trying to monetize in this way starting Engish language programs of study of very doubtful quality to get paying students (esp from China [I think]).
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Yes, this article is a couple years old. But, 2012 is the first time I noticed the huge number of Indians in Bishkek.
http://www.eurasianet.org/node/64644
http://jpohl.blogspot.com/2012/07/indians-in-bishkek.html
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There are a number of outstanding soviet-time mathematicians, physicians and sport scientists despite this reputation.
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Did you mean physicists?
Russian-speaking people are the most brilliant people in the world. Russians, especially. And I don’t mean myself because you need some Russian blood to have this kind of brilliance. And that’s their enormous downfall. They are so brilliant that they have never needed to develop habits of assiduity and hard work and perseverance. Yes, there have been a couple of exceptions. But a system couldn’t be created based on 2 or 3 exceptional people.
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The fields necessary to build THE BOMB were well-developed.
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I heard they stole the bomb. And in any case, those inventors were all jailed while inventing.
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My statement does not contradict yours.
a) they stole some technologies, and saved themselves several years. Still, without good physics and engineering school they would not be able to make it that fast. They would be like China, which is two decades behind in the fields of nuclear weapons, space travel and aviation, despite the worldwide reputation for stealing all possible technologies.
b) yes they were jailed (before 1953), but they were still Soviet citizens, mostly (with the exception of captive Germans, but both sides had them), not martians with superior extraterrestrial knowledge. Between 1953 and the end of 80-ies when everything collapsed, the near-parity with the US was supported by Soviet-educated scientists.
In reality the quality of education varied greatly from one place to another (but the same is true here). Social sciences and humanities were systematically in deep shit since they got politicized. But among natural sciences only genetics was fatally unlucky… Even medicine was at a decent level in some places. The mentality of medical professionals was more directed at prevention rather than mindless pill popping, which is a good thing, even if the reason for that was lack of modern medicines. Of course not all doctors were good, many were bad, or just so-so, and one had to do some research before asking for help (if the time permitted). But it is the same here in the West. Most of the GPs I encountered here randomly, without deliberate research, were pretty useless. Some parts of the FSU are currently experiencing deficit of doctors, because too many went to the West. To be doctors, not to do dirty jobs…
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The system sucked, the pedagogy, the methodology of teaching. The final exam constituting 100% of the grade, lectures where profs read from textbooks, no discussion, short. Remember the famous movie where a student follows a girl to read the famous konspekt? That’s not normal. With good teaching students don’t need to prepare for a final exam at all.
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