akademicheskaia zadolzhennost'

[Joe Peschio]

For Paul Gallagher:

Unfortunately, I can't read your cyrillic, but I gather you're asking about
"akademicheskaia zadolzhennost'".  This is the official term for what
students call "khvosty" - exams not passed/not taken OR "zachety, kotorye
ne postavili" (which could be either a (oral OR written) test/quiz not
passed, or a paper not submitted/not accepted by an official or negotiated
deadline).  For example: Students are commonly abroad in June and don't
take any exams during the spring "sessiia" - they carry an outstanding
"akademicheskaia zadolzhennost'" until they pass all exams and do all the
"zachety", which has to be done by a certain date in fall under threat of
expulsion.  Even more commonly, students don't pass exams or "zachety" the
first time around in spring and carry the "khvosty" over into fall, which
gives them a chance to read the books they were supposed to.  This is a
natural result of 1. the fact that Russian students often have to pass up
to 20 subjects in one semester, frequently without ever having attended
class for some of the subjects, 2. most Russian professors allow up to 3
re-takes, and 3. exam season is consequently still pretty chaotic in most
Russian institutions.  "Khvosty" from the winter "sessiia" are
comparatively rare.

In English, I would suggest "incomplete".  The plural form is also used in
American universities (e.g., in April: "Papers, what papers?  I'm taking
four incompletes, man.").  The verb "pogasit'" is used to denote "clearing
an incomplete".  It's possible that the transcript you're looking at
doesn't indicate whether they did that or not.  I should qualify by saying
that I know this is how the jargon works in contemporary Russian
academic-ese in the humanities and at law schools.  It might have meant
something different in 1989 at a different kind of institution.

I also gather (again, I can't be certain) that you're asking about the
difference between "zachety" and "ekzameny".  The difference is that the
former have a deadline during the semester, whereas the deadlines for the
latter (and "kursovye") are during the "sessiia" after classes
end.  "Zachet" refers to *any* evaluation instrument - book reports,
quizzes, "beseda na temu", design projects, etc. etc.

Cheers,
Joe Peschio

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