In the media

Students, lecturers: who are the plagiarists? Has the Internet revolutionized cheating? How can we combat this phenomenon, which over the last five years has taken on exponential dimensions.

Some 70.5% of French pupils admit to having cheated in school, according to a study on exam fraud conducted among 1,815 students in French multidisciplinary universities.

The alleged peddling of diplomas to Chinese students has puzzled the universities implicated, which are now concerned over the effect of aspersions on the international renown of French tertiary training. Two inquiries – one judicial and one administrative – were opened up following complaints alleging that deals were done in which Chinese students were awarded diplomas in exchange for large amounts of money.

Several hundred Chinese students enrolled at the Institut d'Administration des Entreprises (IAE) at Toulon University, are thought to have bought their degrees. The preliminary inquiry begun on 26 March into "bribery, bribe-taking, and fraud" is investigating practices thought to have started four years ago.

The European Commission wants to call for tenders between now and the end of the year to set up a European educational ranking system for universities. This ranking, which will be available in 2010, would be an alternative to the Shanghai one. Indeed, a study conducted in 2008 questions this ranking; this analysis sought to test changes in the methodology, in order to see how the final ranking would evolve where levels differ, aggregation systems vary or even where one of the six indicators is not taken into account. Result: the ranking can vary from dozens of places.

An investigation published by Nature, reveals that a scientific plagiarism has course among researchers too. Two researchers from South-western Medical Centre of the University of Texas, Mounir Errami and Harold Garner, auscultated an American medical documentation base, Medline, where summaries of 17 million articles published in more than 5,000 reviews from some 80 countries are indexed. They screened it through an engine search, eTBLAST, which is able to locate the "similarities". While focusing on the most quoted 7 million articles, they located a little more than 70,000 cases of "high resemblance". That which, taking into account the limits of the software, makes them estimate the number of plagiarisms at more than 200,000, out of the 17 million referred articles.

The ministry of Higher education and research entrusted to the national Centre of scientific research (CNRS) a mission on scientific integrity. Scientific fraud is varied: biased manufacturing or forgery of results, biased interpretation or selection of data, alteration of curves or images, plagiarism, theft of ideas, financial profit-sharing's ... The increasing pressure which practices on the researchers (among which the career and the credits depend strictly on the quantity of articles and on produced results) tend to multiply the fraudulent practices.

According to the report of the general inspection of the administration of the national education and the research (IGAENR), the evaluation of the students at the university is not good. Actually, the fragmentation of the evaluations (due to the transition to the half yearly of the studies connected to the passage in the LMD) and the complexity of rules, return the illegible system for the students. It also entails disparities of treatment; thus universities develop their own rules of evaluation: the faculties with big workforce opt for the multiple choice question paper, faster and easy to organize. Besides, the cheating is another factor that undermine the credibility of the diplomas: according to the questioned students, between 25 and 50 % of the students resort to it.

The National Council for Higher Education and Research (Cneser), which is an administrative jurisdiction, treats every year cases of fraud in the French education system.

809 procedures against university students have been raised because of cheating. In 1999, 84 cases of fraud were detected for the graduating exam, against 148 cases in 2003. Out of the 77 cases discovered in 2004, 55 concerned use of personnel documents; 8 use of mobile phones; 6 change of draft and 8 false identity.