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Universities are being urged to block websites that sell essays, identify cheating "hot spots" and consider publishing data on breaches of academic integrity. As universities grapple with a rise in contract cheating – which involves students outsourcing assessments – Australia's higher education watchdog has unveiled new guidelines to tackle the issue. A recent survey by a University of South Australia associate professor who helped create the guidelines, found that 6 per cent of Australian students engaged in cheating.

The Federal Government says it will immediately begin to investigate universities operating multiple accounts in violation of the Treasury Single Account policy of the government in order to checkmate corrupt practices in the nation’s universities, adding that concrete efforts would be made to protect whistleblowers in the country as part of the ongoing anti- corruption crusade. The government also said it intends to find an alternative means of sourcing funds for the revitalisation of infrastructure in the universities.

As part of its drive to clamp down on excessive tutoring and elite private schools that prepare students for the best universities, the South Korean government has ordered almost a dozen universities to revamp their admissions tests to bring them more in line with the normal high school curriculum. The ministry of education has said it will look into punishing the universities who have violated the regulations, including a partial ban on recruiting students for the 2019 academic year. Meanwhile, the Korean Council for University Education found that more than 1,500 college admission essays submitted to universities last year were suspected of being plagiarised.

The University Grants Commission (UGC) has released the Draft UGC (Promotion of Academic Integrity and Prevention of Plagiarism in Higher Education Institutions) Regulations, 2017. As the name suggests, the aim of the draft is to create academic awareness about responsible conduct of research and prevention of misconduct including plagiarism in academic writing. The draft also seeks to establish institutional mechanism for promotion of academic integrity and develop systems to detect and prevent plagiarism.

Immediately after the President was elected, borrower advocates and lawmakers expressed concern about what would happen to the current regulations aimed at holding for-profit colleges accountable. On Tuesday, their concerns were validated. The Education Department announced that it would delay and renegotiate two of the previous administration’s signature regulations: the first aims to penalize programs whose graduates’ loan payments exceed a set percentage of their earnings, while the second simplifies the process for borrowers who say they have been defrauded by their colleges.