Are the posts true about an associate professor at the Faculty of Journalism at Moscow State University, who in 2025 complains about illiterate first-year students?

In March 2025, an interview with a Moscow State University teacher circulated on social networks, talking about the extremely low level of literacy among students. We have verified the accuracy of this information.

In an interview, Anastasia Nikolaeva, Associate Professor of the Department of Stylistics of the Russian Language, Faculty of Journalism, Moscow State University, talks about the results of the orientation dictations that first-year students write every year: “Usually three or four people cannot cope with them, but this year’s results turned out to be monstrous. Of the 229 first-year students, only 18% made eight or fewer errors per page of text. The remaining 82%, including 15 100-point USE students, made an average of 24–25 errors. Almost every word contains three or four errors, distorting its meaning beyond recognition. It is simply impossible to understand many words. In fact, these are not words, but their conditional reproduction.” As examples of such errors, the teacher cites the words “over-the-chur”, “arrest”, “vrochi” and “udastsa”. “You know, I’ve been giving dictations for 20 years, but I’ve never seen anything like this,” Nikolaeva notes. On social network X thread with this interview receiving 360,000 views, it was also widely discussed in “VKontakte" And Facebook, where one of the posts received more than 2,200 reposts.

Nikolaeva places the blame for such mistakes on the Unified State Exam (USE) and “Albanian language" is a subcultural jargon popular in the Russian-language blogosphere in the 2000s. His mention suggests that the teacher most likely gave the interview quite a long time ago. And indeed, his text has been written more than once went viral V social networks And Media, and the original was published in the newspaper "Moskovsky Komsomolets" in November 2009. That year the Unified State Exam was just became mandatory to obtain a certificate of secondary education.

Before this, throughout eight years old the exam was carried out in various trial formats in certain regions of Russia, and all this time there was an ongoing debate around educational reform active controversy. Nikolaeva became one of the critics of the new system. At the end of October 2009, she outlined her thoughts in the article “Astap Blender as a Sophetic patient. The literacy of excellent students in the Unified State Exam is killing university teachers”, published by the publication “Private Correspondent”. The article caused a resonance in the Russian-speaking segment of the Internet, and this, in turn, attracted the attention of the traditional press: the newspaper “Moskovsky Komsomolets" published an interview with Nikolaeva that later became viral, "New Izvestia"talked with representatives of other universities, and "Russian newspaper» interviewed the dean of the Faculty of Journalism at Moscow State University, Elena Vartanova. She, unlike Nikolaeva, did not believe that the reason for the poor dictation results lay in the Unified State Examination. “The Unified State Exam is both a test of school knowledge and a tool by which selection for universities is carried out. But the literacy level of school graduates does not depend at all on what instrument was used - a test, a dictation or an essay. If the level is generally low, then it is low,” Vartanova said.

At the same time, in her article, Nikolaeva wrote that she conducted the dictation on her own initiative: “Before this, we did not have such a practice at our faculty - giving a general dictation to the entire course already in October.” And in an interview with Moskovsky Komsomolets she stated something else: “We write orientation dictations to determine the level of knowledge of first-year students every year.” Vartanova also said: “Students of the Faculty of Journalism always wrote so-called orientation dictations in the first semester, and this year was no exception. This is a long-term tradition of our department of Russian language stylistics.”

Thus, the text that circulated on social networks in 2025 about the illiteracy of first-year students at the Faculty of Journalism of Moscow State University has no relation to the current students of this university. In fact, the authors of the viral posts quote the 2009 interview without making appropriate reservations.

Cover photo: Unsplash

Not true

What do our verdicts mean?

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