In the media

In 1999, the Australian Federal Education Minister announced the establishment of the Australian Universities Quality Agency, or AUQA. AUQA has to audit universities as well as non-university institutions. There has been some criticism that AUQA "only looks at processes not outcomes" or that it "looks only at the processes intended to achieve quality and not at the quality itself". In 2006, AUQA commissioned an independent review of its activities.

The Bangladesh government has decided to warn students and their guardians of the fact that private universities' open outer campuses in the guise of regional resource centers, study centers, etc. The ministry has come to know that students who take admission in those unapproved local universities are frequently cheated. Actually, there are 51 private universities in Bangladesh which were run according to the Private University Act 1992, as amended in 1998.

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.

New teachers often face a many-month delay before they receive their salaries. Teachers sometimes supplement their income with a second job. This can affect their own attendance at school, and can put pressure on the amount of time they have to prepare their lessons. A 2007 report by the Cambodian NGO Education Partnership (NEP) reveals education costs for each child averaged $108 annually, or 9 percent of each family's annual income. "When you include informal and formal school costs, and private classes and snacks, many students are paying $2.50 every day," the education and capacity-building officer for the NGO Education Partnership (NEP), told IRIN. The inability to pay informal fees was the most common reason parents gave for their children dropping out, the report stated.

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.

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.

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 UN World Food Programme (WFP) has been successfully running school feeding programmes around the world for years. But in Ghana an independent audit recently revealed that the programme is mired in corruption. By May 2008, 477,714 pupils in 987 schools accross Ghana were benefiting from the programme and according to the Local Government Ministry, with an average of a 40 percent increase in primary school enrolment since the programme was introduced. But an independent school feeding motoring report said that enrolment in 14 selected schools nationwide increased only by 21 per cent between the 2005/2006 and 2006/2007 academic year.

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.

Transparency International's 2008 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) highlights the fatal link between poverty, failed institutions and graft. But other notable backsliders in the 2008 CPI indicate that the strength of oversight mechanisms is also at risk among the wealthiest. In low-income countries, rampant corruption jeopardizes the global fight against poverty, threatening to derail the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). According to TI's 2008 Global Corruption Report, unchecked levels of corruption would add US $50 billion (€35 billion) - or nearly half of annual global aid outlays – to the cost of achieving the MDG on water and sanitation.