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.

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.

A 31-year-old junior clerk in the Eastern Cape Department of Education was arrested by the Joint Anti-Corruption Task Team for allegedly defrauding the department of more than R37 000. He had fraudulently deposited the monthly salary of a retired teacher into a bank account. The Director of communication mentions that his suspension illustrates the department's commitment to eradicating all forms of corruption and running a clean administration.