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The president-to-be of Taiwan’s top higher education institution had been due to take up his post on 1 February after his selection to the top university position by a university committee in January. However, his taking of office has been delayed after it was revealed in January that he was an independent director of the board of a private company, and that the company’s vice chairman sat on the university selection committee. He has also been subjected to plagiarism allegations relating to a paper he presented at a conference in May 2017, but the university said in late January it would not formally investigate the claims.

Some 82 cases of professors listing their secondary school offspring as co-authors in academic papers have been unearthed by an investigation by South Korea’s ministry of education. According to a Korea Herald Editorial, “It is obvious why the professors included the names of their children in the papers. The merit of being co-authors of research papers gives them a good advantage in seeking to enter universities through special admissions programmes”. The discovery could lead to disciplinary action in some cases, under Korea’s strict research misconduct laws which cover author attribution of research papers.

There has been a tenfold increase in the number of students using a false alternative address while living at home to claim for a higher rate of living costs, according to figures released by the ministry of higher education and science, and more than three-quarters of those caught cheating were international students. In 2015 only six students were identified as having cheated with regard to the address provided; and for the first 10 months of 2017 the number was 66. Of these, 50 were either immigrants or children of immigrants, while 16 were Danish citizens, the ministry indicated.

Early research findings on academic corruption suggest that accreditation and quality assurance bodies in some countries are having success in handling the problem, but questions about how to deal with the unwieldy issue remain a work in progress. And while the topic is complex and multifaceted, research on student attitudes towards cheating offers some insights into how an emphasis on integrity might reverse the problem, which has long been the scourge of the higher education accreditation profession.

Three men, including a Delhi University graduate, were arrested for allegedly running a pan-India fake degree racket under which they sold about 50,000 forged certificates of universities and school boards, police said today. The accused, during interrogation, revealed that they had sold at least 50,000 fake degrees and marksheets of various universities and school boards. In order to convince their clients, they had also set up fake websites of the universities and school boards on which the victims verified the authenticity of these documents. The websites were so convincing that victims could not tell the difference between genuine and fake, the senior police official said.

The excitement that marks the beginning of the academic year in the Algerian higher education sector, belies a crisis of credibility in the wake of several recent incidents of cheating. Last October, teachers in the faculty of economics at the University of Algiers disclosed the names of students accused of cheating in a doctoral entrance examination, but thus far no action against the students has been reported in the media. In a city east of Algeria two masters examinations were cancelled in October after model answers were leaked, while in the west, four doctoral projects in the faculty of arts and literature were nullified following complaints of academic dishonesty.

Cheating on a very large scale has just been unveiled in England. Reprehensible acts by both students and teachers have been uncovered during the OCR (for Oxford, Cambridge and RSA examinations), run by one of the most renowned exam boards in the country. In order to pass the UK’s most prestigious competitive examinations, 2300 teachers between 2012 and 2016 helped their pupils obtain better marks. In the same period, 3 602 pupils are accused of cheating. More than half of these teachers were accused of "inappropriate assistance" during written tests, to help their students achieve better results.

The 2011 S Bac math exercise that had leaked on the Internet was not stolen, but there was indeed fraud said the Paris Court of Appeal, which sentenced four young people to three and four month suspended prison terms. This affair had revived the controversy over the profound examination reform. Wanting to make an example of this episode, the Minister of Education had filed a complaint and launched a "zero tolerance" plan against fraud during the baccalaureate. In first instance, the criminal court had acquitted or reduced the sentences of all the defendants prosecuted for concealment, fraud or theft.