Linked to this, teachers reported students outraged if they were not told the examination questions in advance. One might observe similar disparities in formal teaching. Go to a lecture in a Russian university. The students pretended to study and were rewarded with meaningless qualifications, but as long as all the students got their degrees each year the system was seen to be working successfully. Teaching became an opportunity for teachers to demonstrate their intellectual prowess and proceeded without regard to whether or not the students were learning anything.
Russian exams have until very recently been oral rather than written.
Thus attempts to 'teach' Western economics have initially sometimes involved simply the application of rote learning, which was the basic skill developed under the previous regime to Western textbooks. The new market-orientated courses were very often taught in addition to rather than in place of the Marxist and planned economy courses left over from the previous regime. They were therefore able to offer only a glimpse of market economics rather than giving students any real understanding of the subject. In part, of course the resistance to change represents the entrenched positions of senior academics, whose courses would need to be terminated to make way for the new subjects. The malaise in the existing system led us to the view that the only way to achieve radical reform was through the introduction of degrees subject to external examination.