The head of Russia's leading medical school has been fired after a young IT specialist busted a corruption scheme used to help “wanted” students enter the institute.

The young man found out that more than 75 per cent of the university’s applicants were “dead souls” with fake state exams certificates.

Those “students” entered the university straightaway within the so-called first wave of applicants – the ones with the highest exam scores.

Other students who had lower scores saw that there was no chance of entering the university and left the competition. In doing so, they cleared the way for students who had the lowest scores but had paid bribes to university administrators.

“Just imagine, 600 people with the highest grades are all applying to one institute,” Victor Simak, who exposed the scam, told RT. “The most prestigious medical university only had 14 such applicants. For the first few days no one believed we could bring this up for everyone to hear. There were similar cases last year that were not investigated.”

The hacker filed a request to the Prosecutor’s Office, which proved he was right. As a result, at least five staff members at the university lost their positions as well as the rector.

Since Russia shifted to the system of unified state exams in 2006, scandals in the education sphere have spreading like wildfire.

For instance, back in June five students at Russia's top technical university were expelled for sitting exams for school-leavers.

Earlier it was alleged that more than 20,000 school-leavers had used the social networking website Vkontakte to share exam answers.

As the state exams are taken throughout Russia at the same time in every single region of the country, students in Moscow or St. Petersburg had many hours to read what questions were going to be asked and to get ready for the test.

In addition, many teachers believe that the multiple-choice exam, unlike the oral and written exams of previous years, is not the right way to test students.