For the first time, students caught cheating could be criminalised amid fears tens of thousands are buying dissertations from websites – a trend ministers say threatens the quality of British university degrees. Universities watchdog the Quality Assurance Agency said hundreds of “essay mills” are charging up to £6,750 for writing a PhD dissertation. Last year the agency published a report into the scale of the issue, which revealed essay services were available at a cost ranging from £15 to thousands of pounds, depending on essay length and complexity.

In the latest education scam from Bihar, it appears that students can purchase top-scoring intermediate certificates for around Rs 5 lakh without even having to write the exam. Moreover, many schools and colleges have been getting their affiliations by improper means. All these skeletons are tumbling out in the light of probes launched after a TV sting found this year’s top-scoring students struggling to answer basic questions about their subjects. Most memorably, one top student said that political science is about cooking. The rot in the state of education has certainly been a long time cooking.

Academic fraud has consequences for students and society in general. According to one professor, the subject of corruption has been a big debate for many years in Cuba, but that forms of corruption evolve as the means of change.

Turkey has suspended its recognition of Bulgarian university diplomas. The Turkish University Education Council made this decision on the grounds of high levels of academic forgery, fraud and exam cheating in Bulgaria. Bulgaria's Education Minister has admonished the Bulgarian media for provoking an international scandal, claiming that the problematic diplomas were forged by Turkish citizens.