In the media

The Lieutenant Governor of Delhi recently granted permission to the Anti-Corruption Branch to conduct an investigation against four serving and retired vice-principals of Delhi government schools under the Directorate of Education who allegedly paid salaries in the name of 'ghost guest teachers'. An audit carried out in 2018 observed that salaries were paid to individuals who did not work for the school, including the wife of a vice-principal.

The Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority has filed a charge sheet at the Special Court against 11 people for embezzling a huge amount of money from the Council for Technical Education and Vocational Training (CTEVT) to conduct training programmes for teachers. The school administration and CTEVT officials colluded to embezzle state funds by submitting fake bills, including for never conducted trainings.

In February, Columbia Mathematics Professor questioned the Ivy League school’s rise in rankings in the U.S. News & World Report from 18th place, on its debut in 1988, to 2nd place in 2021. In response, Columbia University will refrain from submitting data for consideration in the publication’s 2022, and it will start participating in the Common Data Set Initiative, a collaborative effort among data providers in the higher education community and publishers to provide accurate information to students seeking information on institutions of higher education.

Penn's Center for Community Standards and Accountability released its annual disciplinary report, which indicates that academic integrity and student conduct violation cases have gotten closer to pre-pandemic levels. While there was a decrease in total conduct and academic violations from the 2020-2021 academic year, the data remained relatively consistent with years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Zero Corruption Campaign (ZCC), a civil society organisation that focuses on promoting integrity, accountability, and transparency in the services of public sector institutions, has warned the country’s school authorities to stop collecting money as additional fees for students pursuing their education in 2022/2023. The ZCC said such practices were tantamount to corruption and a deliberate attempt to undermine quality free school education.

The Indonesian Anti-Corruption Commission (KPK) has arrested the Rector of the University of Lampung for allegedly receiving IDR5 billion (US$336,000) in bribes from the families of students who failed the university entrance exams known as the autonomous admissions scheme. According to KPK, the ‘autonomous channel’ exam conducted by universities is vulnerable to bribery due to a lack of transparency and specific guidelines from the Ministry of Education, leaving state universities unsupervised.

The report by Corruption Watch titled “Sound the Alarm” reveals shocking forms of corruption in the education sector: widespread misappropriation of resources, acts of bribery, sextortion, abuse of authority, as well as employment irregularities. Between 2012 and 2021, from the primary to the tertiary level, over 3 600 complaints from pupils, students, parents, and guardians were registered, representing 10% of the total number of reports received.

To prevent the leakage of question papers and other malpractices, the West African Examination Council (WAEC) has tightened the security of the ongoing West African Senior School Certificate Examination. Ten cases of breaches of WAEC rules were identified, including people linked to rogue websites, while the suspects in three cases were convicted and fined by the court. According to the head of Public Affairs of WAECA, schools accused of malpractice will be monitored and confidential material and examination papers will be stored.

The University of Johannesburg (UJ) is the first South African tertiary institution to use blockchain technology as an additional security measure to protect its certificates against alteration or falsification. The Director of Central Academic Administration calls on all tertiary institutions to collectively improve the integrity of their qualifications and enable companies to verify their qualifications easily and at no cost, which will help to prevent certificate fraud and curb counterfeiting.

167 final-year medical students at the University of Oxford will have to resit the exam after alleged misconduct in a clinical examination. The number of investigations related to academic misconduct such as cheating, malpractice and plagiarism has increased from 35 in 2018-19, to 68 in 2019-20 and 77 in 2020-21. The university said that of the investigations conducted in 2020-21, only eight cases of alleged academic misconduct were upheld as an offence, representing a small proportion of the 55,000 exams sat, of which the vast majority were open-book exams.