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Russian Federation implements a five point grading system, where:
| "5", "Excellent" (Russian "пять"([pʲætʲ]), "отлично"([ɐtlʲit͡ɕnɐ])) equal to Highest Distinction (The best possible grade, representing excellent knowledge in a given subject) |
| "4", "Good" (Russian "четыре"([t͡ɕɪtɨrʲɪ]), "хорошо"([xɐrɐʂo])) represents a good knowledge of a subject |
| "3", "Satisfactory" (Russian "три"([trʲi]),"удовлетворительно"([ʊdɐvljɪtvɐrjitɪljnɐ])), sometimes translated into English as "Fair" (This is a credit passing grade) |
| "2", "Unsatisfactory"(Russian "два"([dva]),"неудовлетворительно"([nʲeʊd])) hardly any knowledge, below average, represents the first level of failing |
| "1", "Poor" (Russian "кол"([kol], "единица")) represents complete failure and is the lowest possible grade, very rarely used. |
This system, with minor changes, has been in use in Russian schools since 1837. Between 1917 and 1935, the Communist government had tried to implement a radically new evaluation system with no grades at all, but it has never fully taken root.
Qualifiers + and – are often used to add some degree of differentiation between the grades, e.g. 4+ is better than 4 but a little worse than 5–. Grading varies greatly from school to school, university to university and even teacher to teacher, and tends to be entirely subjective even for courses that lend themselves to objective marking such as mathematics and applied sciences. Even though the grades technically range from "1" to "5", "1" is not very common and is rarely given for academic reasons—in many cases a "1" is given as a result of failure to show up for an exam or to answer any questions. A "2" grade usually means that the student did not show/hardly showed any knowledge in a subject.
It's fair to mention that "1" is somewhat an unusual grade in Russian schools, but it does exist officially. The mostly used grades are five to two. (Plus and minus modifiers follow the same tendency: they are used rarely in middle school, and almost never in colleges or universities.) Some institutions and teachers, unsatisfied with the five-point scale, work with various larger ones, but these grading systems are not recognized by the state and have to be converted for official use.
In higher education, the majority of subjects are graded on ‘Pass/Not pass’ (Credit/No Credit) basis (зачёт/незачёт, pronounced as "zachot/nezachot"), and the rest is graded in terms of numbers. The 'Pass/Not Pass" grades do not have any official numeric representation. When "zachot" (credit or pass) type of subjects are graded as ‘Pass/Not pass’ (sometimes translated as ‘Credit/No credit’) this simply represents student's good/bad knowledge of a subject, and in numeric terms could be interpreted as "more than or equal to "3"/less than "3". Each university implements its own understanding of the appropriate level of knowledge a student must have to pass each subject. Students in Russia typically must pass all the offered subjects to graduate.
Due to several ways to translate the word "zachot" from Russian into English (could be translated as "credit" or "pass"), this type of grades are the source of problems for Russian students applying to Western Universities. Such grades may confuse Western Universities and make it hard to correctly calculate students` GPA in terms of Western systems.
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