The Russian Education Ministry plans to adopt new standards for foreign students willing to study in Russian universities, Izvestia reports.
Foreign students will need to pass a course of preliminary studies with three obligatory and one specialized subject. Students will take an exam for obligatory subjects and an exam or test for one additional one. The course will last 52 weeks, including 38 weeks of lectures, 4 weeks of exams and 10 weeks of holidays.
Students will need to know at least 2,300 words for the Russian language test, be able to perceive 200-240 words a minute and read out 80-100 words a minute. They will need to know Russian literature of the 18-19th centuries, including the works of Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov.
Russia has about 250,000 foreign students from 150 countries studying at 750 of its higher education centers. Russia will pay for the education of 40,000 of them.
