A Vindictive Post
or
Seth: 1 Russian University System: 100

In my last act as a teacher at Ryazan State University, I gave a credit test on US History. I wrote the test, and it's a pretty good one, in my opinion. The only problem is that I gave it to another class of students earlier in the year. Having spent a year in the Russian academic system, I know that more than half Russian students cheat in ways that would be unacceptable in US institutions. Therefore, I should have changed the test slightly to counter the possibility that students from the previous class would leak the test. As the saying goes in Russia--they have it in Iowa, so they must have it here in Russia--"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, can't get fooled again." But I did get fooled!

At the test my foolishness was not quite great enough to miss two students in the back who I had never seen before. They explained that they should be allowed in because they had been sick. They spoke with such assurance that I thought it was a normal situation and let them take the test. About an hour into the test, I realized that most of the students had not learned the information on the test but had memorized answers they knew would be on the short answer section and the letters in the multiple choice section; the biggest clue was when I saw a student mouthing a mnemonic, "Brad And Angelina Can Do..." Well, something like that.

After a couple days of fury, I calmed down and decided to pass the students who had attended class. In my defense: 1. This was only a pass/fail class and they had done other coursework; 2. They gave some thought to their short answers and essay; 3. It's not my job to reform Russian undergraduate education.

Having come to this decision, I came to work with my zachet (pass/fail test) pen, ready to write "pass" for everyone. Almost everyone. I had done a little homework and learned that students have to show a special document to be admitted to a test if they missed an egregious number of classes. Neither of the two had the document. In addition, they didn't bother to learn the mnemonic (Jennifer Aniston fans?) or memorize the short answer answers. I think my favorite was the last multiple choice in which both chose the option "Taliban" to answer the question "Who assassinated Abraham Lincoln?" In any case, neither had come close to passing, no signing was done and they went away without a fight.

You may be asking, "Hey, but weren't these girls sick? Isn't it unfair to take your frustration with Russian education out on two sick girls?" Believe me, these girls were never sick. I mean they carried their own IVs up the stairs. Next question. "Didn't the Taliban try to assassinate Lincoln in the Jean Claude van Damme hit Timecop?" No, it didn't. As you can find in the grossly long summary of Timecop on Wikipedia, the villain of the film was a '96 presidential hopeful trying to contribute to his campaign fund by purchasing stock on the cheap during the Great Depression. I think the Taliban-Lincoln(-Booth?-Oswald?) idea has a lot of potential, though.