In the media

The Assistant Minister of Education and Skills Development has told Parliament that he is not aware of any fund embezzlement at the Botswana Society for the Deaf in Francistown. Answering a parliamentary question on March 25, he said his ministry had in the past three years given the Botswana Society for the Deaf subvention amounting to P3 917 411.65.

One in seven Russian students readily admits to cheating in university exams and one in 25 students also reports having paid for someone else to write at least one mid-term or final-year paper, according to the annual Monitoring of Education Markets and Organizations Project (Memo), which received responses from almost 3,000 Russian undergraduates in 2013.

Plagiarism at the higher education level has been an open secret, with many suspected plagiarists holding senior faculty positions in different universities across the country. But in a comical turn, the Higher Education Commission recently gave its best research paper award to a scholar who had been blacklisted by the regulatory body in 2008 for publishing a plagiarized paper.

Members of the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity discussed their latest set of proposals to overhaul the accreditation process and the way the committee assesses the accreditors. Soon after, the US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions released a somewhat similar set of proposals in a white paper written by committee staff members.

Scandal and large scale cheating. Images of dozens of parents climbing the walls of an examination building to help their children was a scandal and spread like gun powder on the Web. Dozens of persons, mobile telephones and cheat sheets in hand, were to be seen hanging onto window sills of a building where end-of-term exams were being held.

Dozens of people were filmed scaling the walls of a school in Hajipur to fraudulently provide students with answers to exam questions. 

Four teachers of a higher secondary school at Hosur in Tamil Nadu were arrested on Friday for allegedly leaking the question paper for the Class 12 board exam through WhatsApp. Police identified the accused who was on exam duty at the Matriculation Higher School on Wednesday. He took the photo of the mathematics question paper with his smartphone and sent it to other teachers through WhatsApp.

The Higher Education Board (YÖK) has launched an inquiry into allegations that about 450 students, most of whom are relatives of senior Justice and Development Party (AK Party) figures, were enrolled at Istanbul University's open and distance education faculty (AUZEF) even though they did not meet the enrollment criteria. All high school graduates have to pass the YGS and the LYS in order to be admitted to universities in Turkey.

The acting Chairperson of the Liberia Anti-Corruption Commission (LACC) has called for increased budgetary allotment to the education sector to adequately prepare Liberian youths for future challenges. According to the Chairperson, the assessment report in the education sector indicates that lack of integrity on the part of students and teachers was "extremely high" due to the low budgetary allotment to the sector.

The ZENU Network set out to fight corruption in 16 high schools across 8 districts in the Western parts of Cameroon by establishing student clubs in schools. One of the tools used was to put in place “corruption observatories.” The activity focused on victims of corruption and provided a whistleblowing mechanism, while pressuring authorities to impose sanctions for corrupt behavior.