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Five universities in the United States agreed to settle a lawsuit accusing them of colluding on financial aid and admissions violations, according to new court filings. Yale, Columbia, Duke, Brown and Emory universities will pay a combined US$104.5 million to settle their portions of the case, which was brought by five former students against more than a dozen schools. The suit alleges the universities violated antitrust law when they ignored their pledge to not weigh a student’s ability to pay tuition fees when considering whether or not to accept, a practice referred to as ‘need-blind’ admission.

Over 5,000 students had their results withdrawn by Zimbabwe Schools Examination Council (ZIMSEC) after massive leaks. A headmaster and a teacher at Thokozani school had been arrested after they gained access to the examination papers and sold them to Zvishavane residents. However, according to a legislator, ZIMSEC used the school as a scapegoat for the examination board’s investigations to be concluded hastily.

The central figure in the scam in which wealthy parents paid huge sums to cheat on standardised tests has been sentenced to three and a half years in Federal prison. The mastermind of the sprawling college admissions scam known as Operation Varsity Blues pleaded guilty to racketeering conspiracy, money laundering, and conspiracy

Three Georgia women and an Alabama man pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the US Department of Education’s Federal financial aid programs worth millions of dollars. According to the Justice Department, they admitted enrolling people who were not eligible to attend college and completing financial aid applications using fake students’ names; they also did fake students’ homework and exams and manipulated grade requirements to continue qualifying for Federal financial aid.

The Indonesian Anti-Corruption Commission (KPK) has arrested the Rector of the University of Lampung for allegedly receiving IDR5 billion (US$336,000) in bribes from the families of students who failed the university entrance exams known as the autonomous admissions scheme. According to KPK, the ‘autonomous channel’ exam conducted by universities is vulnerable to bribery due to a lack of transparency and specific guidelines from the Ministry of Education, leaving state universities unsupervised.

The Department of Justice reports that two education officials have been sentenced to jail after pleading guilty to fraudulently enrolling people in virtual schools and then claiming money from public funds on their behalf. The districts received payments from the Alabama Education Trust Fund as if the students were attending public schools while the defendants misappropriated state money through direct cash payments and payments to third-party contractors owned by various co-conspirators.

The Anti-Corruption Commission has charged five members and an executive director of the North South University (NSU) board of governors with abuse of power, increasing their allowances to ten times the approved rate, and buying luxury cars at the expense of students. For more than a decade, NSU has offered several Bachelor of Business Administration programmes without University Grants Commission approval. According to an investigator, NSU was allowed to enrol 50 students in approved BBA programmes, but it enrolled about 2,700 students in one semester.

The Director of the Future Gate Agency was sentenced to seven years in prison and fined 7 million dinars (about $50,000) after 75 Algerian students who wanted to enrol in foreign universities, including in Ukraine, Turkey, and Russia, fell victim to fraud. Although they paid the Agency large sums of money, the accommodation conditions were wretched, and their university applications forged. Two of their assistants and three influencers, prosecuted in the same case, were given one year in prison and fined 100,000 dinars (about $700) each.

Six Iranian and Azerbaijani nationals have been arrested for stealing and selling questions and answers from the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) that foreign students take for admission to universities in the United States and Turkey. The suspects allegedly charged the “buyers” between $2,000 and $3,000 for the questions provided in their network called “quarantine houses”. While searching the addresses where the suspects were arrested, Turkish police found SAT admission papers, official test question books and a host of digital evidence.

The Ministry of Education (MoE) announced that the supplementary fees for security guards at schools are entirely voluntary. However, schools preventing children from attending class because their parents have not made such payments will be punished by the Law. The MoE also reported corruptions scandals in the Southern province of Inhambane, such as the sale of fake certificates or the rigging of examination marks for the Teachers Training Centre admission charged 780 US dollars.