The Higher Education Department in Bhubaneswar has discovered several colleges admitting students for the 2023-24 academic session without valid recognition, violating the Odisha Education Act of 1969. Despite the provision of temporary recognition for a cumulative duration of seven years, these colleges continue to operate without proper authorization. The Department has directed regional directors of education to compile a comprehensive list of such institutions. Meanwhile, in Uttar Pradesh, the Education Department has successfully improved attendance in Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalayas through the use of face-recognition technology, addressing issues of ghost students and proxy teachers.

Investigations carried out by the State Anti-Corruption and Vigilance Bureau have revealed cases of corruption within the offices of the Department of Education, particularly in relation to the appointment of teaching and non-teaching staff in government-aided public schools, the payment of subsidies for management purposes, the creation of new unauthorized posts, the fixing of salaries, retirement benefits and the granting of leave. Since 2018, management appointments for non-existent vacancies have been illegally validated. In addition, government-approved orders for posts in aided schools have been deliberately delayed due to non-payment of bribes.

A petitioner accused Adesh Institute of Medical Sciences and Research, Bathinda of unethical practices and alleged employment of at least 12 ghost teachers. The employees would just come to the private institute and mark their presence and then return to their own institutes. The high court directed medical bodies to investigate the complaint and take appropriate action.

Renewal or continuation of engineering courses across India depends on All India Council of Technical Education’s (AICTE) approval of information provided by colleges. As the institutions were forced to submit correct data, AICTE found that over one lakh (one hundred thousand) teachers existed only on paper, were working without the requisite qualification, or were teaching at multiple institutes as full-time faculty.

The number of students disciplined for academic misconduct at the University of Auckland rose to 195 last year, from 187 the year before. Cheating incidents reported have highlighted concerns about the reuse of assignments and the fact that ghostwriters undermine school integrity. According to the Tertiary Education Union president, university bosses should support teaching staff to implement the best anti-cheating measures such as changing assignments frequently and requiring students to submit their work through detection service Turnitin.

The teacher-student ratio, a measure of quality of education, which is already abysmal at 1:21, is set to worsen after the discovery that nearly a tenth of teachers employed in higher education turned out to be ghost teachers. Around 130,000 teachers were found to be fake. India has about 1.4 million teachers in colleges and universities. While the good news is that this will lead to a focus on improving the quality of teaching, the bad news is that the country has just found out that understaffing in higher education institutes is far greater than what has been estimated so far.

Cheating by students who use essay mills is “virtually undetectable”, according to a study that found that many ghost-written papers would receive good marks if they were submitted. An associate lecturer in history at the University of New South Wales, conducted an experiment in which she ordered essays from 13 ghostwriting websites and then had them graded by leading academics who believed that they were looking at genuine student submissions. The results were “alarming”, with the quality of purchased essays being “higher than expected”; The use of essay mills might therefore be “much, much higher” than previously thought.

Macquarie University has revoked the degrees of two students and prevented a further 10 from graduating after an independent investigation revealed the students used an online ghost-writing service to complete their assignments. The Northern Sydney University is the latest institution to finalise its internal investigations into the MyMaster cheating racket, in which up to 1,000 students from 16 universities hired the online company MyMaster to write their assignments and sit for online tests.

The Medical Council of India has asked state counsels to investigate the problem of “ghost” teachers in medical colleges following the discovery of more than 400 fake teachers in four colleges in three states. These “ghost teachers” are registered as faculty members drawing a hefty salary, but have never taken a single class. Most of them run private clinics, and only attend the college when there is an impending medical inspection.

At the helm of the company embroiled in a large-scale academic cheating scandal is a Chinese-born businesswoman. The enterprising 30-year-old has used her accounting degree to build a lucrative ghostwriting service, called MyMaster. This pitch has seen the MyMaster company turn over at least $160,000 during 2014 and return more than 900 fraudulent assignments to students prepared to hand over up to $1,000 for the work.