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According to teacher estimates, 20% of assignments are copied and pasted from other sources. Anti-plagiarism charters should be systematically signed by both universities and students, but nothing can beat the eagle eye of the lecturer.

Yet another senior German politician is the focus of questions about his doctoral thesis. Lower Saxony's Minister of Cultural Affairs is alleged to have quoted incorrectly several sources in his dissertation, creating the impression that he originated more of the content than was actually the case.

A member of the European Parliament has bowed to pressure from Germany's major higher education and research organisations and stepped down from her new post in the European Parliament's Committee on Industry, Research and Energy, following plagiarism accusations.

Weeks after Germany's defense minister was forced to resign in a plagiarism scandal, three German universities say they are investigating similar complaints about the academic work of three figures from the country's political sphere.

Paper mills and cheat sites are losing ground to social and user-generated Web sites as sources of material for student papers, and Wikipedia rules above all others as a source for plagiarism. A third of matched content derives from online sites where people contribute and share content, while only 15 percent of content matches have ties to sites specifically promoting "academic dishonesty".

Turnitin News recently conducted a study that examined which Internet sites students used in their written work. They classified 110 million content matches in 40 million student papers that were submitted to Turnitin over a ten-month period.

The frontier in the battle to defeat student cheating may be here at the testing center of the University of Central Florida. As the eternal temptation of students to cheat has gone high-tech – not just on exams, but also by cutting and pasting from the Internet and sharing of homework online like music files – educators have responded with their own efforts to crack down.

Could student plagiarism actually be reduced? And could it be reduced not through fear of being caught, but through... education? The evidence in a study released earlier in January suggests that the answer to both questions is 'yes' - which could be welcome news to academics who constantly complain about students who either don't know what plagiarism is or do not follow the rules about the integrity of assignments.

A senior African academic has lost his job for the second time after an Australian university that appointed him in January belatedly discovered he had been forced to quit his South African post the previous November following charges of serial plagiarism.

There have been calls for Welsh universities to be more consistent in dealing with students who plagiarise. New figures show between 2008 and 2011, 927 students from six Welsh universities copied work.