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An online university that supposedly granted a graduate degree in business to a pet cat was sued Monday for consumer fraud by the Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office.

Corruption is a widespread problem; exam cheating is on the rise with technologies such as cell phones.

A former Texas Tech University researcher, who was convicted of mishandling harassment complaints and cheating the university out of its share of clinical-research money, was sentenced last week to two years in prison and a $15,000 fine.

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.

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.

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.

Northern Kentucky accused five professors of fabricating data in scholarly papers, duplicating large chunks of their own work in several papers, plagiarizing, and listing as authors a number of professors at the university who did not contribute.

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.