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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.

The online disclosure of college admittance high-school exams has led to nationwide disruptions in Egypt and Algeria. Despite vows by authorities to make sure tests are secure, exam questions have been leaked prior to exam administration in both countries for several years. An October decree by President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi called for prison sentences for unauthorized disclosure of testing materials. But that decrees has failed to deter a cluster of Facebook groups that have leaked exam questions.

The Eastern Cape Education Department has concluded its investigation into 'ghost pupils', but it still faces the 'ghost teachers' scandal. The wife of a former African National Congress (ANC) Chief Whip faces 16 counts of fraud and 10 counts of money laundering after allegedly pocketing more than R1 million by processing several fake applications for Grade R teaching posts.

This is what is provided in a law passed last autumn to combat endemic levels of cheating during the gaokao, china’s national exam which determines the future career of its candidates. Following the adoption of the law, student caught or accused of cheating can face seven years imprisonment in a state gaol. A law voted in last autumn, also makes cheating a crime. This is why, last Tuesday 7 June, the day of the goakao, the Chinese authorities ordered the deployment of 768 police officers, tasked with supervising the country’s 96 exam centres.

In Algers on Sunday, the prime minister reiterated the government’s willingness to fight against fraud in the education sector, following the leaking of the 2016 baccalaureate exam questions, and called on Algeria’s citizens to join the fight against such behaviours. “The recent Fraud experienced in the education and knowledge sector is inacceptable and the government is determined to fight it to its fullest extent” declared the Prime Minister. “When this level of knowledge is targeted, it becomes a matter of national security.”

The Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC) launched a report on the Free Primary Education (FPE) programme, after the Ministry of Education revealed that most schools cannot account for the funds. According to the EACC Chief Executive Officer, the report will help in ensuring accountability in public schools, given that heads of schools will be required to detail how every shilling allocated by the government is spent.

The state of Egypt’s public schools is an essential indicator of the ways in which the Egyptian revolution has not reached its citizens. In fact, private tutoring has now become Egypt’s de facto education system. A number of teachers have admitted, unofficially, that they teach the strict minimum in class so as to be able to recuperate these same students in private tutoring sessions. According to some estimates, Egyptian families spend over 1 billion dollars in private classes to compensate for the poor level of education: a cost which comes to almost a quarter of the family income.

At the opening ceremony of the zonal conference of the Association of Women in Colleges of Education (WICE), the Provost of the College of Education, decried the existence of corrupt practices in schools. He said corruption can be reduced when people embraced the principles of transparency, integrity and accountability in public and private transaction. The theme of the conference was: “The role of education in curbing corruption and youth unemployment in the 21st Century.”

THE HRD Ministry is set to launch a programme next month that would probably be the world’s largest student tracking system, sources said. Shala Asmita (All School Monitoring, Individual Tracing Analysis) Yojana (SAY) aims to track the educational journey of close to 25 crore school students from Class I to Class XII across 15 lakh schools in the country. This online database will carry information about student attendance and enrolment, mid-day meal service, learning outcomes and infrastructural facilities, among other things, on one platform for both private and government schools.