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A significant number of faculty members are being accused of securing their academic promotions through predatory publications and other sub-standard means. To combat this unethical practice, the Ethiopian Ministry of Science and Higher Education (MoSHE) issued a new Harmonised Standard for Academic Staff Promotion in Public Universities in October 2020. The MoSHE says the safest way to avoid predatory publications is for academics to submit manuscripts to peer-reviewed journals indexed by databases such as Scopus, Web of Science and PubMed.

Following an increase in breaches of academic integrity during the remote fall term, two teaching assistants (TAs) are asking Queen’s University to take action against academic misconduct. In grading final assignments using Turnitin, they found that four of her five plagiarism cases had copy rates of 50 and 60 per cent. When reporting the cases of plagiarism, the administration claimed the process was ‘’intense’ while the professor of the course suggested marking the assignment with a 20 per cent grade deduction because they “didn’t want to make this misconduct a big deal.”

Too many corrupt professors have infiltrated the idyllic garden of erudition. The University of Dhaka syndicate has penalized with demotion three teachers found guilty of plagiarism. A recent University Grants Commission investigation found the vice-chancellor of Rajshahi University and other officials guilty of manipulating the recruitment process in order to recruit 30 unqualified family members into teaching positions.

A recent report highlights risks of investment of funds into the UK education sector by African elites, including “politically exposed persons”, some of whom have been convicted of corruption or whose assets have been seized by the UK. According to the report, the gap between what west African PEPs pay for a UK education and what they can legitimately afford is a significant red flag. Relatively lax anti-money laundering rules in the British education sector mean that school administrators and admissions staff are potentially complicit in illegal flows of money.

A former Executive secretary of the Lagos State Scholarship Board has been charged with 8 counts of criminal conversion of N127 million belonging to the scholarship board. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission’s report revealed that the funds meant for students’ scholarship payments, staff welfare and office renovation had been used for personal purposes.

A recent study warns policy-makers in developing countries about the poor quality of research evaluation. The findings show the infiltration of journals suspected of predatory practices into the citation database Scopus. 324 journals that appear both in Beall’s lists and on Scopus and 164,000 articles published from 2015-17 were identified. As a result, the Scopus Content Selection and Advisory Board removed underperforming journals.