Russia Is Installing Video Cameras in School Classrooms

Photo via LiveJournal.

Imagine taking the SAT but instead of just the standard pressure of needing to succeed at this test or sacrifice your entire future, you now have video cameras and federal agents watching you too.

That's how Russia wants to do it. They're planning on installing video camera surveillance into nearly every classroom as early as this spring, according to a story in the Moscow Times.

It's the latest development in the ongoing saga of Mother Russia's efforts at educational reform, which had previously been dominated by rampant corruption and palm greasing, allowing only the wealthiest and most well-connected students to attend universities. It meant that about $520 million a year was being spent on bribery of college admissions officials, according to a report by the UN cultural agency UNESCO.

In 2009, the federal government admitted the problem needed to be fixed and implemented their version of the SAT, the Unified State Exam or the EGE.

It's been part of an overall modernization effort led by former President Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's current prime minister, who believes the test directly combats corruption and will lead to greater transparency.

Education and Science Minister Dmitry Livanov echoed this goal when speaking about the plans to add camera surveillance. “Increasing transparency, increasing public control over the unified exam is one of the major directions of our work. When everybody learns to take the exam honestly, there will be no need for these control measures," he said.

The SAT is no stranger to controversy in the US, and Russia is going through the same debate now with the EGE. Standardized tests may provide a unified rule of measurement, but is it the most accurate way to gauge a student's worth?

Sergei Komkov of the Russian Educational Fund, an organization that has challenged the legality of the EGE in court, doesn’t think so. “It’s a very simplistic way of testing knowledge,” he told RFERL. “It does not reflect the completeness, the range, of knowledge, and how it should be tested.”

Standardized tests are also criticized for focusing more on trivia than reasoning ability. Student Anna Florinskya told RFERL, “There are questions which aren't thought through. For example, there was a question about literature: ‘What color eyes does Anna Karenina have?’”

Additionally, educators are complaining that the students are less prepared for college since their education has become so focused on preparation for the test.

Professor Yevgenia Petrova of Saratov State University told the New York Times, “We see that students might do brilliantly on the EGE, but they come here and don’t know a lot.”

Tougher too is the notion that the EGE may not actually be fixing the problem of corruption, only redirecting it. The statistics from the Interior Ministry show that corruption has in fact doubled in 2009.

Sergei Mironov of the Federation Council, which is Russia's upper parliament, has said the EGE has only had a negative impact. In a story from the New York Times, he’s quoted as saying the EGE “experiment is playing a negative role.”

So will adding further pressure to the testing situation reduce cheating? Will adding cameras to the classroom fix everything?

I found a positive example of the usage in the case of the University of Central Florida’s testing centers, which implemented camera surveillance and reported a drop in cheating to 14 suspected incidents out of 64,000 tests taken.

Yet in the case of the EGE, cheating is generally not happening in the classroom so much as answers or copies of the test are being purchased ahead of time. So time will tell if the latest crackdown has a positive effect or is simply adding more pressure to an already pressurized situation.

According to the New York Times, Yevgeny Yamburg, the director of State Educational Institution Educational Center No. 109, where students prepare for the test, said, “It’s an old Russian tradition to take the worst from the West and try it here.”

“The idea is not bad,” said Maria Zamyatina, 15. “It just hasn’t been polished.”

@grantpa