In the media

The committee set up in March last year by the Education Minister to investigate racism and sexism in higher education has revealed that discrimination was pervasive despite all the good policies generated by the institutions. The committee believes that the racism persists in higher education mostly because of the weakness of the institutions' information dissemination: it recommended the creation of a transformation compact which will help to oversight the institutions to sensitize staff to the different needs of students from various cultural and economic backgrounds.

Education found that students of Class 8 and 9 were answering question papers at an under-graduate exam in Azamgarh district with the help of invigilators. The investigators have also known that the students have taken money from the original aspirants who had paid them to get the paper solved.

The "Miasin" youth movement has launched an anti-corruption drive in several of Yerevan's colleges and universities that features the photographs of bribe-taking teachers being pasted. On the walls of buildings located next to Yerevan State University there are photos of at least twenty faculty and administration members with the word "bribe taker" written on them.

Kyrgyz are now focusing on a new standardized test that officials contend will help eradicate graft in universities. Low teacher salaries and the long-standing practice of selling grades make that target a challenge. Many students simply purchase their degrees. In exchange, the instructor allows him to pass without taking exams, or completing the assignments.

Companies that employ graduates to write essays and complete assignments for undergraduates claim they are not undermining academic standards because cheating occurs only if the students pass off the work as their own, something they discourage. In the other hand, reduced contact hours between undergraduates and lecturers make it harder for staff to detect work that is out of line with the student's abilities or writing style.

The recent stripping off of a PhD title of a Polytechnic, was as disgraceful and fraudulent as it was happening under the watchful eye of academics. Surprisingly, government which should have been more concerned with this academic fraud seems unruffled. If people with falsified academic and professional qualifications flood the job market, the results are, obviously, incompetence, loss of business and failure to meet set targets or goals.

Academics and students around the world at this very second are being subjected to infringements of their professional and human rights, and most of these violations are going unnoticed. Violations of this kind are not limited to countries with poor human rights records. On the contrary, in the post 9/11 world even the most transparent democracies are showing signs that are a cause for concern. Many institutions and academics in the West are subject to an increasingly sophisticated infrastructure of surveillance, intervention and control.

A German professor has won a precedent-setting case to prevent European Union publishers from using university-collated compendiums of out-of-copyright materials to produce their own commercial collections of works. A ruling from the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg said that publishers could be blocked from selling these books, if they "transfer a substantial part" of the original source to their own publication.

A leaked e-mail from Manchester Metropolitan University shows how university staff are being urged to increase the number of top degree grades to keep pace with competing universities. The leaking of the e-mail provides further evidence of the concern among academics over the pressure to manipulate degree awards to improve the public image of universities and to make them more attractive to applicants. The number of students achieving a first class degree at UK universities has more than doubled since the mid-1990s.

The plagiarism is more and more spread in universities. In cause, Internet. To overcome this phenomenon, the catholic university of Louvain makes sensitive and tests a detector software of plagiarism. Every work or report is scanned by the software. Green light, the work is "sane". Red light, similarities with accessible documents on the Web or in the works of other students exist and the teacher will have to establish the scale of the plagiarism.