The Ministry of Education have evaluated the results of the Unified State Exam of 2013 and identified the regions with the highest numbers of graduates who got the full 100 points on the Unified State Exam. Contrary to popular prejudices, the recordholders aren’t the Caucasian republics, but Bryansk oblast, Kalmykia, and Chuvashia.
I wrote half a year ago (highlights are recent):
As we can see above, the most suspicious results are mostly from ethnic Russian oblasts such as Stavropol, Kaluga, Rostov, Perm, and Vladimir, with the two big exceptions being Mari El and Chuvashia… In so doing, yet another major region of likely fraud crops up: Bryansk. This oblast, along with Vladimir, produces as many top USE results as a percentage of its 18 year old population as does the intellectual capital, Moscow. Kalmykia, Kirov, and Lipetsk also join the list of Russian regions with suspiciously good USE results…
To the contrary, Dagestan – the biggest Caucasian Muslim republic – has very few top scores relative to the number of very bright people we can expect to find there relative to most other Russian regions
Hard to argue with statistics. Also why you should continue reading Da Russophile.
Added info: apparently some well-off Muscovites do take their exams in Dagestan (I know of this because my nephew is reaching that age); it is considered easier to get better results there. It would be interesting to know stats about the “Dagestani” students and how long they were in Dagestan prior to taking their exams.
Something I googled:
http://ru-facts.com/news/view/22284.html
Sorry for the piecemeal posting. Here the Dagestani minister of education is officially denying “exam tourism”:
http://vestnikkavkaza.net/news/society/41177.html