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A leaked e-mail from Manchester Metropolitan University shows how university staff are being urged to increase the number of top degree grades to keep pace with competing universities. The leaking of the e-mail provides further evidence of the concern among academics over the pressure to manipulate degree awards to improve the public image of universities and to make them more attractive to applicants. The number of students achieving a first class degree at UK universities has more than doubled since the mid-1990s.

Since taking over the Kremlin last month, President Medvedev, has made it a priority to combat what he calls "legal nihilism" in Russia. A campaign has begun to clean the courts of bribe-taking judges and letters from members of the public, complaining about corruption, have been published on the Kremlin website. Reporting on the results at St. Petersburg, the daily Kommersant said that 83 out of 200 students in the law faculty had failed their state examinations. Some who had received grade 2, the lowest mark, had been expecting to leave with "red diplomas" or distinctions. Among those who failed were students who had paid fees.

Fake degrees from every university in Wales are being sold on the internet for less than £40 a go, a Wales on Sunday investigation has found. The website, called the Fake Certificate Factory, offers degrees from all of Wales' top universities – including Cardiff, Swansea, Glamorgan, Aberystwyth and Bangor. Wales on Sunday was able to buy a degree in English literature bearing the crest of Cardiff University for just £39.95, which we received the next day by post. And for an extra £49.95 we were offered a fake transcript, which provides a detailed breakdown of exam marks supposedly achieved by a student in their final university exams.

The plagiarism is more and more spread in universities. In cause, Internet. To overcome this phenomenon, the catholic university of Louvain makes sensitive and tests a detector software of plagiarism. Every work or report is scanned by the software. Green light, the work is "sane". Red light, similarities with accessible documents on the Web or in the works of other students exist and the teacher will have to establish the scale of the plagiarism.

According to a study published in the February issue of the Comparative Education Review, educational corruption in the former USSR and other former communist regimes has increased since the end of the Cold War. Among the immediate problems for students is that a devalued degree adversely affects their earning power. Devaluation of degrees has serious international policy implications, degrades the entire social system of those countries and decreases the likelihood that those graduates will be able to improve their economic standing.

For the very first time in Guinea, professors were suspended by their functions for facts of corruption and the students were condemned to pay a fine or to a prison sentence for fraud in the examinations. During his taking of office, Mr Souaré, Minister of the Higher education and the scientific research - who arises from the labor union of the teachers and which fought in the past against the corruption - had indicated that it would make of the fight against the fraud and the corruption its first priority.

Makarere University, in Uganda, one of the most prestigious universities in Africa may revoke 200 degrees awarded in the past years after an internal committee charged with investigating academic fraud, discovered that students have been enrolled without any evidence that they met admissions criteria.