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The European Commission wants to call for tenders between now and the end of the year to set up a European educational ranking system for universities. This ranking, which will be available in 2010, would be an alternative to the Shanghai one. Indeed, a study conducted in 2008 questions this ranking; this analysis sought to test changes in the methodology, in order to see how the final ranking would evolve where levels differ, aggregation systems vary or even where one of the six indicators is not taken into account. Result: the ranking can vary from dozens of places.

The plagiarism is more and more spread in universities. In cause, Internet. To overcome this phenomenon, the catholic university of Louvain makes sensitive and tests a detector software of plagiarism. Every work or report is scanned by the software. Green light, the work is "sane". Red light, similarities with accessible documents on the Web or in the works of other students exist and the teacher will have to establish the scale of the plagiarism.

An investigation published by Nature, reveals that a scientific plagiarism has course among researchers too. Two researchers from South-western Medical Centre of the University of Texas, Mounir Errami and Harold Garner, auscultated an American medical documentation base, Medline, where summaries of 17 million articles published in more than 5,000 reviews from some 80 countries are indexed. They screened it through an engine search, eTBLAST, which is able to locate the "similarities". While focusing on the most quoted 7 million articles, they located a little more than 70,000 cases of "high resemblance". That which, taking into account the limits of the software, makes them estimate the number of plagiarisms at more than 200,000, out of the 17 million referred articles.

The ministry of Higher education and research entrusted to the national Centre of scientific research (CNRS) a mission on scientific integrity. Scientific fraud is varied: biased manufacturing or forgery of results, biased interpretation or selection of data, alteration of curves or images, plagiarism, theft of ideas, financial profit-sharing's ... The increasing pressure which practices on the researchers (among which the career and the credits depend strictly on the quantity of articles and on produced results) tend to multiply the fraudulent practices.

According to the report of the general inspection of the administration of the national education and the research (IGAENR), the evaluation of the students at the university is not good. Actually, the fragmentation of the evaluations (due to the transition to the half yearly of the studies connected to the passage in the LMD) and the complexity of rules, return the illegible system for the students. It also entails disparities of treatment; thus universities develop their own rules of evaluation: the faculties with big workforce opt for the multiple choice question paper, faster and easy to organize. Besides, the cheating is another factor that undermine the credibility of the diplomas: according to the questioned students, between 25 and 50 % of the students resort to it.

The annual report of Transparency International on corruption perception worldwide shows that progress has been made in Sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern Europe. The report also underlines that corruption most afflicts the poorest countries where governance is nonexistent and that money acquired through corrupt practice often come from multinationals based in rich countries.

The National Council for Higher Education and Research (Cneser), which is an administrative jurisdiction, treats every year cases of fraud in the French education system.

809 procedures against university students have been raised because of cheating. In 1999, 84 cases of fraud were detected for the graduating exam, against 148 cases in 2003. Out of the 77 cases discovered in 2004, 55 concerned use of personnel documents; 8 use of mobile phones; 6 change of draft and 8 false identity.