How is Doctoral Students’ Admission Arranged at Russian Universities?

Abstract

The paper examines the rules and procedures of the doctoral students’ admission at Russian universities. The inefficiency of the selection process often becomes the subject of discussion in the studies devoted to the low performance of Russian doctoral education, but these studies lack structured information about the current rules and procedures. The present research closes this gap. Using the quantitative content analysis of the local admission rules of 150 random Russian universities, we estimated the prevalence of various admission practices. Two groups of universities are compared in the study: those with and those without special statuses (federal, national research, flagship, participants of the «5-100» program), since the presence of such a status implies that the university implements a set of measures aimed at developing doctoral programs and increasing the graduate students’ demand. The results of the study show that despite the absence of the regulatory restrictions on the choice of selection tools, Russian universities tend to choose fairly formal procedures: traditional exams and consideration of the individual achievements (papers, patents, diploma with honors). More flexible tools to assess the applicant’s motivation, his or her research experience, and plans for a dissertation are extremely rare and appear in universities with special statuses. The results of the research can be useful for the heads of the doctoral education departments at Russian universities, as well as for other staff involved in the process of the doctoral students’ admission.

Building a strong foundation: How pre-doctorate experience shapes doctoral student outcomes

“…Our results explain the low effectiveness of the selection process in Russia by showing that the most frequent criteria that are taken into account by Russian universities-formal academic achievements, according to the study of Zhuchkova [32]-are not associated with successful defense in the future. And in contrast, those criteria that can reflect the only significant factor (research experience related to the dissertation topic), such as the quality of a project proposal, are the least widespread in Russian universities [32].…”

“…The common usage of formal criteria leads to a growing share of students with non-academic motivation, irrelevant skills, and lower chances of success [31]. Although normative documents allow for a change in the selection system, only a limited number of organizations currently use alternative criteria emphasizing candidates' previous learning and research experiences (2-25% depending on a specific procedure; [32]).…”

“…The majority of the presented options (papers, conferences, competitions, olympiads, scholarships, diploma with honors) correspond to the student's achievements that universities in Russia usually take into account during their admission campaigns [32]. However, research experience is not always converted into such formal achievements.…”

“…."). We also divided some options into two versions describing experiences related and unrelated to the topic of a student's dissertations as many institutions distinguish these types of experiences and require applicants to have experience specifically related to their dissertations [32]. Finally, since a significant proportion of Russian students pursue a doctorate to advance their careers as instructors or teachers in universities or other educational organizations (48% in the study [35] and 43% in our sample), options that reflect teaching experience were also included in the question.…”

Operationalising University Excellence in Doctoral Education: The Case of Top-Ranked Russian Universities

“…The impacts of excellence-driven schemes on research education have largely been understudied in Russia. More recent studies explore various aspects of doctoral education across universities with special statuses, including doctoral students' admission procedures (Zhuchkova, 2022) and the redistribution of doctoral students towards leading Russian HEIs (Zhuchkova and Bekova, 2023).…”