Academic grading in Russia

Russian Federation implements a five point grading system, where:

Qualifiers + and – are often used to add some degree of differentiation between the grades, eg. 4+ is better than 4 but a little worse than 5–. Grading varies greatly from school to school, university to university and even teacher to teacher, and tends to be entirely subjective even for courses that lend themselves to objective marking such as mathematics and applied sciences. Even though the grades technically range from "1" to "5", "1" is not very common and is rarely given for academic reasons—in many cases a "1" is given as a result of failure to show up for an exam or to answer any questions. A "2" grade usually means that the student did not show/hardly showed any knowledge in a subject.

It's fair to mention that "1" is somewhat an exotic grade in Russian schools, but it does exist officially. The mostly used grades are five to two (Plus and minus modifiers follow the same tendency: they are used rarely in middle school, and almost never in colleges or universities. Some institutions and teachers (excluding Russia), unsatisfied with the five-point scale, work with various larger ones, but these grading systems are not recognized by the state and have to be converted for official use.

It is necessary to understand, that in Russian universities, all the courses are compulsory subjects. There are no electives in the sense of Western system available in Russia. However, very rarely in some universities there are certain subjects that are not graded at all. Such subjects could be interpreted as elective additionals, because they are not compulsory, do not contribute towards the degree and will not be mentioned in the final degree paper (diploma).

Majority of subjects are graded on ‘Pass/Not pass’ (Credit/No Credit) basis (зачёт/незачёт, pronounced as "zach`ot/nezach`ot"), and the rest is graded in terms of numbers. The 'Pass/Not Pass" grades do not have any official numeric representation. When "zachot" (credit or pass) type of subjects are graded as ‘Pass/Not pass’ (sometimes translated as ‘Credit/No credit’) this simply represents student's good/bad knowledge of a subject, and in numeric terms could be interpreted as "more than or equal to "3"/less than "3". Each University implements its own understanding of the appropriate level of knowledge a student should have in order to pass studied subjects. Students in Russia must pass all the offered subjects in order to graduate.

Due to several ways to translate the word "zachet" from Russian into English (could be translated as "credit" or "pass"), this type of grades are the source of problems for Russian students applying to Western Universities. Such grades may confuse Western Universities and make it hard to correctly calculate students` GPA in terms of Western systems.