Allegations of academic fraud have been made against nearly 20 alternative higher education providers in London in recent months, the head of the UK’s standards watchdog has said. Warning that fraud and malpractice now pose a “real challenge” to traditional quality assurance in higher education, the chief executive of the Quality Assurance Agency, said that his organisation had “recently received and, in some cases, investigated allegations about admissions, malpractice, academic fraud and the falsification of evidence in 19 alternative providers in London”.

A postgraduate student in the Business Administration Faculty, who made an audio recording of a lecturer of the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife, Osun State, demanding five sessions of sex in order to increase her marks, appeared Tuesday before the investigative committee set up by the university. Her lawyer expressed optimism that the outcome of the investigative panel would serve as a lesson to other predatory lecturers.

India’s tough new anti-plagiarism law drawn up by the higher education regulatory body, the University Grants Commission or UGC, which sets out graded punishments depending on the seriousness of the misdemeanour, has been widely welcomed by academics – but many said there needs to be even stronger deterrence to curb copycat tendencies among students and lecturers. The UGC announced the Promotion of Academic Integrity and Prevention of Plagiarism in Higher Education Institutions Regulations 2018 late last month.

A survey of British institutions reveals that few have taken concrete steps to stop the much-criticized misuse of research metrics in the evaluation of academics’ work. The results offer an early insight into global efforts to clamp down on such practices.
DORA calls for panels responsible for academic promotion and hiring to stop misusing metrics such as the journal impact factor — which measures the average number of citations accumulated by papers in a given journal over two years — as a way to assess individual researchers. It urges panels to assess the content of papers and quality of research instead.

Some 82 cases of professors listing their secondary school offspring as co-authors in academic papers have been unearthed by an investigation by South Korea’s ministry of education. According to a Korea Herald Editorial, “It is obvious why the professors included the names of their children in the papers. The merit of being co-authors of research papers gives them a good advantage in seeking to enter universities through special admissions programmes”. The discovery could lead to disciplinary action in some cases, under Korea’s strict research misconduct laws which cover author attribution of research papers.

While the West likes to highlight examples of corruption or malpractice in Africa, in fact they can be found in every country, including the US and the UK. Nigeria as one of a number of countries developing quality assurance capacity that is instituting explicit laws against certain types of corruption, monitoring institutions and shutting them down if there is evidence of corruption. Across Africa, GUNi-Africa is building capacity, talking to officials, pressing for public awareness and ensuring that people who are caught are sanctioned and that the sanctions are publicised.

The Higher Education Commission (HEC) will meet next week to decide the fate of its second most important officer whose research paper was found to be 88 percent plagiarized. The Chairman had set up a committee to probe the allegations of plagiarism against the commission’s Executive Director (ED). Sources said after the issue came to the light through a news story published in this paper, the committee formed by the HEC Chairman held a meeting this week to review the Executive Director’s research paper which was found plagiarized.

The Education CS wants universities selling degrees to politicians de-registered. He said the government is planning a major shake-up in higher education, including a crackdown on private universities, from next year. "I am happy now that councils have began to bite and strip people of their degrees. We would like to see more universities do that together with CUE and the Education ministry," he said on Monday during the AMFREF graduation ceremony. The crackdown will target institutions operating contrary to the statutory provisions guiding the higher education sector. Among those targeted are those operating on letters of interim authority beyond the statutory period.

The Supreme Court of India has dealt a serious blow to deemed universities granting degrees that are delivered by distance or correspondence learning without first obtaining mandatory permission from the statutory bodies. The court suspended the engineering degrees awarded to students on distance courses between 2001 and 2005 by three deemed universities; and annulled degrees granted by those institutions after 2005. It also issued a blanket restraint on all deemed universities obliging them not to carry on any course from the academic year 2018-19 “unless and until specific permissions are granted by the concerned statutory authorities”.

Elite universities in the United States and the United Kingdom have been investing endowment funds offshore in order to pay little or no tax, according to details revealed in the so-called Paradise Papers. According to the student run Fossil Free Pitt Coalition “We are concerned about the lack of transparency, as two-thirds of the endowment is just a mystery to us. We are suspicious about where that huge segment of the endowment is going.” An emeritus professor in accounting at the University of Essex, told the newspaper that UK universities should be more transparent about their investment decisions, since they are public institutions that receive public money, including from the European Union.