Чому протестували в Ужгороді іноземні студенти?

Yesterday, May 23, an unexpected event took place on Universytetska street. Nearly fifty students of the medical faculty of UzhNU, who are citizens of other countries, mainly India, marched in protest from the building where they study (the building of the Institute of Electronic Physics) to the main building of the university.

As you can see in the video below, they were shouting slogan "We want justice" and showing corresponding posters. This is quite unexpected and unusual for Uzhgorod. We talked with students to find out what the reason for their protest was. Recently, there has been a lot of talk about the manifestations of xenophobia in Ukraine, including Transcarpathia, was this what students were outraged about?

It turned out, it wasn’t. The foreigners said that they consider the new final exam system KROK-2 unfair. They are convinced that it significantly reduces their chances of successful passing the exam and, consequently, obtaining a diploma.

– We were taught the basic course, – one of the protesters, Ahmed Nur said. – And in the KROK-2, it takes up only 40% of the tasks. And 60% are topics that we are not prepared for. And the problem is not that we can not or do not want to learn additional knowledge, it’s just absolutely unfair, it reduces the chances of success.

 

– So your complaints are not about a particular educational institution, but about the nationwide rules in education? Are you satisfied with UzhNU and the level of knowledge, in general? – I asked them.

– Yes, teachers here are good. But problems still arise, even for the most assiduous students. Sometimes, there are good professional teachers, but they do not know English so well to explain information. In addition, some questions in the "KROK-2" test are badly translated.

I also took a brief comment from the Dean of the Medical Faculty 2 Vasyl Kaliy on this matter.

– What caused this protest?

– Actually, at this moment, I do not see the reasons for such panic. Of course they are afraid that they did not pass the exam. But this happens every year! And last year, they protested too. But in actuality, the results were even better than the average in Ukraine. I think it will be the same this year.

– I’ve heard two opposing stereotypes about students from abroad. The first is that they study hard for the sake of knowledge, and not just for grades. And the second is that on the contrary, they just care about the papers, and therefore they are prone to slacking…

– In fact, there is no difference between foreigners and our students. And you can’t just generalize them. There are very clever and diligent students among them, but there are also slackers. But in this case, I do not think there are grounds for protests. Let’s wait for the results. I repeat, their knowledge level in general is not bad.

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To summarize, it should be added that the students’ concern is, of course, not groundless. If the test questions were consistent with what students were studying, I think there would not be any protests, so the reform in medical education is really painful.

And one can not but mention another nuance – changes in test questions affected all students, not only foreigners. But Ukrainian students do not seem to be concerned about them. Perhaps foreigners are more vulnerable to the changes?

 

Below are some photos from our conversation with the students and a video of their protest march to the main building of UzhNU.

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