In the media

The children know that they can pay to get better marks. Other methods are also familiar such as sale of diplomas, « correction » of the mark report or embezzlement of school money by the teachers.

An inspection of more than 100,000 schools has found that students have been charged 853 million yuan in illegal fees last year, Education Minister Zhou Ji said yesterday. He said 395 headmasters were among the 2,448 people fired or punished for imposing the fees. About 639 million yuan had been returned to parents after the inspections. Illegal charges for everything from school uniforms to field trips are rampant in many areas, prompting the government to launch a far-reaching clean-up campaign.

In recent years, literature and broadcasts on a specific theme "campaigns against corruption and mismanagement" have become favourites for Chinese publishing houses and TV stations. Books on this subject frequently make best-seller lists while their TV adaptations are broadcast in prime time on channels of the national China Central Television (CCTV) network and provincial stations.

Web-based bogus UK universities appear to be thriving despite the efforts of the authorities to shut them down. UK and US trading standards officials last year closed down 14 websites offering fake British degrees for up £1,000 each. The certificates, from 14 made-up institutions, were said to have been used by hundreds of unqualified people, mainly in North America, to gain jobs in areas such as teaching, computing and childcare.

Diploma-mill owners are an elusive bunch. They flood e-mail boxes with offers of cheap college degrees, and collect payment through Web sites, then filter that money into overseas bank accounts. When the police try to shut one of the businesses down, the owners just set up shop elsewhere, often in a poor country with weak fraud laws. Unable to snuff out these illegal businesses, many states have changed their strategy: if you can't catch the dealers, go after the consumers. A handful, like Illinois, Indiana, and New Jersey, have recently criminalized the use of fake degrees.

Graduates of a radiology-technology program in Kentucky have sued the institution, claiming that it lied about the program's accreditation status. The institution's three-year radiology-technology program costs about $33,000 to complete, and is still not accredited by the proper organization, the Joint Review Committee on Education in Radiologic Technology. Nine students have graduated from the program, and 75 are currently enrolled. Without accreditation, students cannot take the national licensing exam and earn the proper credentials for employment.

Apparently worried about the products of the different levels of education in the country and the attendant effects of examination malpractice and cultism on Nigerian youth and national development, the Federal Ministry of Education, in collaboration with the Exam Ethics Project (EEP), an educational non- governmental organisation last week held a two-day Education Stakeholders. governmental organisation last week held a two-day Education Stakeholders.

When the General Teaching Council for England was set up it faced an uphill struggle to keep teachers and unions on side. Three years on, John Crace asks: has it made a difference and is it adequately carrying out its function as an investigator of misconduct?

Welcome to Patna, a city that in its own strange way has married the free market to the classroom. The arrests of several peoples for leaking the question papers for the Common Admission Test for entry to the Indian Institutes of Management are only the tip of the iceberg.

The National Teachers institute (NTI) has said emphasis on exam certificates by higher institutions and employers of labour is responsible for examination malpractice in the nation's institutions of learning. It also fingered poor teaching and administration by school heads – registering unqualified students, facilitating impersonation, using classrooms rather than halls to conduct exams as contributing to the menace of examination malpractices.