Admission to the Pirogov med school in Moscow has always been pretty straightforward: You give the head of the school thousands of rubles, and he lets you in.
The Russian government figured it had gotten around this system by instituting a standardized exam, and mandating that the university admit the highest scorers.
The head of the school sat down and scratched his head and came up with a solution.
Announce you’ve admitted a class of high scorers. Then a few weeks later announce that none of the high scorers has chosen to attend Pirogov, so you’ve admitted instead the traditional cohort.
Would have worked, too, except for some damn blogger who figured out the scheme.
August 15th, 2011 at 4:12PM
I have to admire that degree of respect for classic Russian literature. Not only do you have the dead souls angle, BUT the “imaginary top students who don’t show up” sounds like something straight out of Ilf and Petrov.