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A senior law student at Istanbul Bilgi University faced disciplinary action for allegedly using AI, ChatGPT to cheat on an exam. The student’s legal battle ended in suspension, causing financial and emotional distress. The case highlights the challenges of AI in maintaining academic integrity and the need for clearer policies.

The General Secretary of the Republican Turkish Party (CTP) highlighted the significance of the ongoing investigation into a fake diploma scandal and its implications for corruption within senior bureaucratic and political circles. He pledges the CTP's commitment to monitoring the process and work towards enhancing the effectiveness of regulatory bodies like the Higher Education Planning, Evaluation, Accreditation and Coordination Council YÖDAK to improve governance and accountability in higher education institutions.

Six vice-chancellors from Cambridge, Exeter and UCL have signed up to a pledge which commits universities to stop using legally binding non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) against students and staff who report sexual harassment. The Higher Education Minister stated that universities should end the use of NDAs which “buy victims’ silence” in sexual misconduct cases.

When a doctoral student denounced the theft of her work, she was told that it was part of the game. One in five PhD students in the academic world is facing this practice. According to an online survey conducted among 1,800 PhD students and young doctors, 21% of respondents said they had seen someone else take credit for their work. Concerned about the impact on their future careers, many PhD students choose to remain silent on such abuse.

The Office for Students (OfS) has published a circular detailing minimum acceptable student outcomes which set thresholds for drop-out rates, course completion and graduate employment that universities and colleges will need to meet to avoid further investigation. According to Ofs, over 60,000 students on full-time undergraduate courses are currently enrolled at institutions in England that could be sanctioned for low quality and poor value for money.

Last April, the Office for Students set out a list of recommendations aimed at helping universities to prevent and respond to sexual harassment and misconduct on campus. According to ministers in the UK, universities failing to take tough action on sexual misconduct should risk losing their official status.

Six Iranian and Azerbaijani nationals have been arrested for stealing and selling questions and answers from the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) that foreign students take for admission to universities in the United States and Turkey. The suspects allegedly charged the “buyers” between $2,000 and $3,000 for the questions provided in their network called “quarantine houses”. While searching the addresses where the suspects were arrested, Turkish police found SAT admission papers, official test question books and a host of digital evidence.

Increasing numbers of students in British universities are buying and selling essays. Research from 2018 shows that one in seven students have paid someone to write an essay for them. In 2021, The Guardian reported that the number of requests sent to a leading ‘homework help’ website rose by 196% between 2019 and 2020. In 2021, one private tutor was offered hundreds of pounds to take students’ online exams for them. Another agreed to write a dissertation for £3,000.

In a national survey on research integrity by Dutch academics, 40,000 researchers, from PhD students to full professors, admitted to committing at least one of the 11 questionable research practices. One in 12 researchers is estimated to have fabricated or falsified research results in the last three years. According to a postdoctoral researcher and lead investigator of the survey, findings are already being discussed with policymakers in universities and medical centres in the Netherlands.

A survey of 51,000 college and high school students reveals that the average percentage of plagiarism before and after Covid increased from 26% to 45% in the Netherlands, from 37% to 49% in France and from 42% to 53% in India. The new anti-plagiarism software CopyLeaks uses Artificial Intelligence to detect plagiarism and copyright infringement. CopyLeaks can be used as a site license purchased by a school, institution, or publication, by individual writers who pay based on the number of words and pages checked.