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Most secondary school authorities handed over the first term report cards to their students with various remarks. Those who attended classes regularly and worked hard during the term had good averages while others who played games and occupied drinking spots during school hours brought home fake report cards to impress their parents. The "ghost" students were last Friday seen in cyber cafés scanning and modifying their reports cards.

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.

Educationists in Nairobi believe many would-be graduates are seeking essay and thesis writing services, undermining quality in higher education institutions. Such fraudulent academic businesses are said to be mushrooming around universities. While they are not a new phenomenon, they are growing along with the number of students in universities.

Today there are 39 higher education institutions and 250,000 students in Slovakia, which has a population of 5.4 million. In 2008 only two higher education institutions were using plagiarism detection systems. The situation was serious and required a solution. The Ministry of Education decided to launch a systematic fight against plagiarism. A goal was set: by 2010 it would be obligatory for all Slovak institutions to use the national central repository for theses and dissertations (NCRTD) and the national plagiarism detection system (NPDS).

A journalist from the Mail and Guardian reveals the growing trend of fake degrees, provided by Ashford University and Belford University, which offer life experience qualifications on a fee-only basis, without the need for training or study. These documents are available on the Internet and are being included on resumes at all levels of the employment sector.