Search Page

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.

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.

In a decision intended to curb the widespread sale of seats in professional colleges, India's Supreme Court has ordered that private institutions may no longer demand the "donation" of extra, upfront fees from new students. Medical and engineering colleges now demand upfront payments of tens of thousands of dollars, from students whose test scores do not qualify them for places.

Police officers have collected "much new evidence" in the case of an alleged exam-selling ring at Rome's La Sapienza University, the largest university in Europe, the local newspaper Il Messagero reported last week. According to police officers, students paid fees ranging from $1,695 to $ 3,391, depending on the degree of difficulty, to receive oral-exam questions in advance from the faculty member who would test them.

Two-member team of the Gujarat University has found that the management of the Arts and Commerce College, Pipariya, and the SMT D V Bhagat Science College, had allegedly passed students by charging hefty amounts from them.

Nepal's anticorruption commission says that tens of thousands of government employees, including teachers, police, and senior bureaucrats, have been using fake university degrees. The Commission for Investigation on Abuse of Authority says it suspects that 10 percent of the Himalayan kingdom's 140,000 schoolteachers are using diplomas purchased from India.