Red or Blue

Red or blue?

On Saturday, I defended my term paper with an excellent grade. That officially completed the fourth of my five semesters at RANEPA.

I would like to share a screenshot from my student account showing that, after four semesters, my average grade is 5.0. But you may have heard that RANEPA’s information systems suffered a cyberattack at the end of April. Since then, many things have not worked, including the average-grade display.

In this post, I would like to reflect on gold medals and honours diplomas.

The value of a gold medal at school is perfectly clear to me: it gives you advantages when applying to university. As you may remember, I do not have one, because a gold medal at AESC MSU is almost unimaginable.

There were several requirements for an honours diploma at Moscow State University:

• No grades below a B on the diploma;
• An average grade above 4.75 (mine was 4.81);
• Excellent grades in both the state examination and the diploma thesis.

I put in the effort and earned my honours diploma. What did it give me? Perhaps an advantage when applying for postgraduate study.

In postgraduate study, I passed every examination with an excellent grade. At my PhD defence, all 33 ballots out of 33 were in favour. Unanimously!

What did that affect? Absolutely nothing! A PhD diploma has no distinctions within a given field: no colour, no anything else.

Back to RANEPA: we live in a new normal, so modern students face plagiarism requirements in addition to the traditional ones. To qualify for an excellent grade:

• Originality must exceed 65%;
• Matches and citations must each be below 10%.

I made a little extra effort and met those requirements (see the screenshot).

Why? What will it give me in the future? Just in case? Is this what high-achiever syndrome is?

I have only one answer to all these questions.

I need it for myself, so that I can look without shame into the eyes of that ten-year-old boy from Class 5A who, more than 30 years ago, proudly watched everyone passing by from the honour board at Secondary School No. 4.