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According to an in-depth study entitled Effective Delivery of Public Services in the Education Sector, the progress achieved in Mozambique's education system in the last twenty years are is being threatened by diversion of funds, fraud concerning school admission and the awarding of building contracts, as well as by sexual extortion for good grades. The authors of the inquiry underline the urgent necessity to implement an anti-corruption legislation.

An international forum has developed a code of ethics to apply to education agents and consultants who recruit international students for universities, colleges and schools around the world. The forum says the code and an accompanying statement of principles it has also published will facilitate a common approach and raise ethical standards in the recruitment of international students by education agents and consultants.

Afghan education officials have found themselves embroiled in controversy after a record number of students failed in national university entry exams last week. Afghan students accuse the Higher Education Ministry, which determines university placement, of fraud and discrimination, insisting that as many as 60,000 of them failed purely on the basis of their ethnicity and mother language.

Bar-Ilan University was fined by the Council of Higher Education for admitting students without bachelor's degrees to graduate programs. The panel ruled that Bar-Ilan will be responsible for financing the undergraduate degrees of students who were enrolled in violation of the Council of Higher Education's guidelines.

Once comprehensively surveyed, the magnitude and reach of fraud is becoming clear. For example, research suggests that the majority of applications from a number of large student-sending countries are either significantly embellished or outright fraudulent. As a result, tens of thousands of international students, having passed through visa and admissions systems, are enrolled all over the world based on school transcripts, financial support statements, recommendation letters or test scores that are untrue.

The detection of wholesale cheating in college applications is on the rise due to the use of Turnitin for Admissions, an anti-plagiarism database service that compares student essays to an immense archive of other writings. Around the country, more than 100 colleges and universities have adopted it, mainly in graduate divisions, although Stanford University is among the dozen schools starting to use it for freshman applicants this year.

Corruption, funding shortages and an obsession with profit are plaguing the quality of university education in Cambodia, students say, driving them overseas in search of masters and PhD programmes.

The Immigration Minister admitted yesterday there may be widespread abuses of a visa scheme that provides foreign students with the chance to enrol at UK institutions after irregularities were found at a Scottish university.

Turkish prosecutors are investigating allegations of possible cheating and favouritism in the annual university entrance exam sat by 1.7 million students on 27 March. Suspicions were raised this week after a lawyer discovered a formula for correct answers for multiple-choice maths questions on one exam.