In the media

Questions and answers for the annual university entrance exams Concours have been sold in exchange for $10,000-20,000 to secure placement at top universities. Telegram’s social media channel published the test questions half an hour after the exam started, as evidence of their leakage. But according to the head of the Ministry of Higher Education's assessment organisation, 480 participants who had tried to use digital equipment to receive answers to the test questions from outside have been arrested.

Reports indicated that 14.6 million Iranians were expected to start school but the country was unprepared to accommodate them. A big number of dilapidated institutions have not received the necessary funding for reconstruction and furthermore, it was indicated that there was a shortage of around 100,000 teachers across the country. Students at the Amir Kabir University in Tehran participated in a demonstration against corrupt practices that are making their fees rise beyond all affordability.

Given that scientists are judged in large part by the number of peer-reviewed papers they produce, it’s easy to understand the temptation to engage in salami publication. It’s officially discouraged, but it’s still very common to see researchers writing perhaps 3 or 4 papers based on a single project that could, realistically, have been one big paper. In an extreme case of salami slicing, the journal Archives of Iranian Medicine published a set of 33 papers about one study.

More than 600 degree programmes in 60 universities in Iran are now segregated by gender, in what is being seen as a major expansion of the government's efforts to separate male and female students. Iranian rights groups released the report of a study by Student News, which found that there has not only been an increase in gender separation but also in gender discrimination.