International Higher Education, Fall 2004

Academic Integrity and Its Limits in Kyrgyzstan

Madeleine Reeves
Madeleine Reeves is a doctoral candidate in social anthropology at the University of Cambridge. She is currently research associate at the East-West Center for Intercultural Dialogue at the American University–Central Asia in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Address: Trinity College, Trinity Street, Cambridge CB2 1TQ, UK. E-mail: mfr21@cam.ac.uk.

A recent issue of International Higher Education sought to draw attention to the question of corruption in academe, a topic that has tended to be politely passed over in analyses of higher education policy and practice (see IHR no. 34). When it is discussed, corruption is generally portrayed as a deviation from some presumed “normal” state of affairs: it is portrayed as the exception, rather than the rule—the fault of the miscreant teacher, the lazy student, or the immoral administrator, rather than the product of systemic difficulties. The very language we invoke tends to presume the corruptness of a basically sound system, rather than a fundamental mismatch between what individuals and institutions are nominally “supposed” to provide and their ability to do so in practice.

This article proposes a somewhat different framework for thinking about the possibilities for ethically sound educational practice. It asks about the preconditions for, and limits to, academic integrity, the latter term understood in its double definitions of “moral uprightness, honesty” and “wholeness, soundness.” Corruption, in this perspective, is interpreted not as the deviant action of particular immoral individuals, but the symptom of a much broader, systemic dis-integration: the inability of certain parts of a system to integrate with, and thus respond to the needs of, other parts. It draws upon interviews with academics and students in Kyrgyzstan over three years, as well as direct participant observation as a teacher of English in a remote, regional state university in which instances of corruption are widespread.

Impositions and Improvisations
Kyrgyzstan, as many other post-Soviet educational systems, retains a high degree of ministerial control over the content and structure of university curricula. Ministerial plans dictate the precise number of hours that students of a given “speciality” are to dedicate to different subjects during the course of their five years of university education; these plans are typically displayed prominently in university corridors, and they regulate closely student and teacher course loads in any given term, the scope of particular disciplines, and the chronological order in which subjects are to be taught. A small percentage of courses can be nominated by faculty deans and departmental chairs (also subject to ministerial approval), and students are nominally entitled to one or two “optional courses” (kursy po vyboru) in their final years of study, although in practice these tend to be narrowly prescribed—often to a choice of just one. The standard teaching course load is 500 classroom hours per term, a figure that, week-by-week, would stagger many Western academics. Punishingly low rates of pay mean that it is not uncommon for teachers, especially younger teachers (who need more time for course preparation) to take on 1.5 and even double course loads in order to make ends meet.

Such a system presupposes both a considerable degree of homogeneity among student intakes across the population (students all entering university with an identical degree of preparation) and the ability of all universities to meet ministerial requirements in terms of personnel, literature, and material resources. Rural universities expose with particular clarity the absurdity of such assumptions. For while the university curricula in such institutions mirror those taught in the capital city, entering students come with nothing like the same degree of preparation, and the pool of qualified teachers that the institution is able to attract is far smaller.

The reality, of course, is that with all the goodwill in the world teachers simply cannot deliver what is expected of them. The result is either that they decide to deviate massively from the nominal content of a course in order to cover the basics or that they stick to the intended content, leaving the students floundering as they fail to grasp the meaning of the material presented. In either case, academic integrity is jeopardized, since the list of courses and grades that are accumulated in the grade book (zachetka) at the end of each term bear little correspondence with material taught or knowledge gained. What is true of the individual student’s grades is true also of the department’s register of lectures given, the dean’s list of courses taught, the rector’s reports on the institution’s ability to meet its academic targets, and the ministry’s announcements to the outside world about the impressively high levels of tertiary education in Kyrgyzstan. In each case, the rhetoric has little correspondence with the reality facing students and teachers.

Dis-integration and Corruption
Such a lack of correspondence leaves the door wide open for corruption. Obviously, teachers are far more likely to seek bribes, and students are far more likely to give them when it is nearly impossible to answer exam questions honestly for want of coverage of the relevant material. More insidiously, the constant—indeed institutionalized—lack of correspondence between what is claimed and what is delivered (and what can, in fact, be delivered), between the actual and the “certified,” blurs the boundary between ethical and unethical. Acting “ethically” in academe becomes divorced from the idea of testing ability according to firm, transparent, and nonnegotiable standards of knowledge gained. With so much improvisation required by the system (the paradoxical consequence of ministerial overcontrol), the grade book is no longer an index of “knowledge gained” but instead a statement of a personalized relationship between teacher and student. This transformed relationship is only reinforced by a system of government grants for higher education that penalizes students financially for a single grade below a “4” (corresponding roughly to a “B” in the U.S. system) and by the chronic underfunding of higher education, which means that fee-paying students (kontraktniki) will virtually never be excluded from a university for poor academic performance if they continue to pay their bills. In such a context, institutions often consider it perfectly “ethical” for a teacher to give a high grade to an academically undeserving but financially needy student studying at university on a government stipend. The motivation is to ensure that the student concerned retains the grant that supports her family or to lower the academic requirements for the kontraktniki who are paying for their degrees—to keep the enrollments up for a given program and to keep money flowing into the university coffers.

These practices may not be instances of corruption per se, but they certainly damage the academic integrity of the institution and represent a violation of the ethical obligations that exist between teacher and student and between university and the wider society. They also open the door to other, more egregious forms of corruption that are widespread in Kyrgyzstan: bribes to teachers for end-of-term grades and bribes by teachers for academic positions; the purchasing of course papers, senior theses (diplomnaya rabota), and even candidate of science degrees; and payments and favors to admissions committees, departmental chairs, and examination commissions.

The result is not only the production of underqualified specialists whose real knowledge corresponds only remotely with the list of courses detailed on their diplomas. Another effect is a much more profound societal scepticism regarding assertions of educational expertise. As the title of a recent newspaper article on the issue put it, “the red diploma is fading” in contemporary Kyrgyzstan. What was formerly an indicator of academic excellence, awarded only if one had the highest grade in all subjects, has been devalued into a near meaningless currency.

To deal with the problem of corruption in higher education, therefore, it is not enough simply to ask, as is typically done in Kyrgyzstani public discourse, “how do we stop students from giving bribes, and teachers from taking them?” We must ask the much broader questions, “how do we re-integrate the system?” “What are the institutional and administrative preconditions for academic integrity?” “How can we reinstate a boundary between ethical and unethical in a way that meets rigorous academic criteria?” To address these questions, it is not enough only to pay teachers more (although that is, crucial since academic integrity is impossible when teachers cannot earn a living wage), nor is it sufficient simply to expose instances of bribe giving and taking within a given institution.

Answering these questions demands, more radically, that we think structurally and systematically about the relationship between the Ministry of Education, particular institutions, the student body, and the wider public. Greater autonomy is required to determine curricular content for faculties and individual departments. Basing the allocation of funding for university programs on individual student grades needs to be ended since it can lead to grade inflation. A substantial cut is needed in the number of courses that students are expected to take and teachers are expected to instruct, which leaves little time for assimilating and preparing material, and encourages a “memorize-recite-forget” approach to learning. Perhaps most importantly, it demands that curricula and individual courses at all universities, especially those catering to a predominantly rural student body, be configured to meet the needs of today’s school leavers, taking into consideration actual rather than imagined levels of preparation and available rather than hypothetical course materials.