Moscow State University's Mekh-mat used deliberately hard 'coffin problems' in oral entrance exams to fail Jewish and other undesired applicants

During the 1970s and 1980s, the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics (Mekh-mat) at Moscow State University is reported to have used its oral entrance examinations as an instrument of discrimination: examiners posed problems — later nicknamed "coffins" (гробы) — that were elementary-looking but in practice extremely hard or effectively unsolvable within the exam, and reserved them for applicants the faculty wished to reject, disproportionately Jewish applicants and others deemed undesirable. Because the oral format left no written record and admitted subjective grading, it could enforce an informal quota while remaining deniable.

This admissions-level mechanism is the institutional counterpart to the individual-exclusion episode in claim-pontryagin-used-committee-vote-to-help-block-margulis-1978-fields-medal-travel: the same milieu that could bar a Fields Medalist from traveling could also keep talented students out of the lecture hall in the first place. Such exclusion is repeatedly named as a political-push driver of the 1970s–80s Jewish- mathematician emigration wave — the precursor to the 1990s economic-push story the vault treats in claim-soviet-emigre-career-premium-was-structural-not-ability and claim-soviet-scientists-immigration-act-1992-exceptional-ability-waiver.

The claim is recorded here from a Tier-4 aggregator and paraphrase only. Its core is well documented in the scholarly literature (A. Vershik and A. Shen on the Mekh-mat entrance exams; M. Shifman's collected volume), and pulling one of those primaries — with an example "coffin" problem and named testimony — is what would move the note off seedling. That verification is routed to question-verify-mekh-mat-coffin-problems-primary-sources.