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Thousands of UK nationals have bought fake degrees from a multi-million pound "diploma mill" in Pakistan, a BBC Radio 4's File on Four programme investigation has found. Buyers include NHS consultants, nurses and a large defence contractor. One British buyer spent almost £500,000 on bogus documents. The Department for Education said it was taking "decisive action to crack down on degree fraud" that "cheats genuine learners

While the West likes to highlight examples of corruption or malpractice in Africa, in fact they can be found in every country, including the US and the UK. Nigeria as one of a number of countries developing quality assurance capacity that is instituting explicit laws against certain types of corruption, monitoring institutions and shutting them down if there is evidence of corruption. Across Africa, GUNi-Africa is building capacity, talking to officials, pressing for public awareness and ensuring that people who are caught are sanctioned and that the sanctions are publicised.

The Higher Education Commission (HEC) will meet next week to decide the fate of its second most important officer whose research paper was found to be 88 percent plagiarized. The Chairman had set up a committee to probe the allegations of plagiarism against the commission’s Executive Director (ED). Sources said after the issue came to the light through a news story published in this paper, the committee formed by the HEC Chairman held a meeting this week to review the Executive Director’s research paper which was found plagiarized.

Scientists from the University of Ottawa, The Ottawa Hospital and other top-tier institutions across Canada keep publishing their results in fake science journals, tainting the work despite years of warnings. One veteran science publisher warns all the work that produced these studies “is just thrown away.” Until recently, the scope of the problem of “predatory” journals has been hard to measure. Now, one giant in the fake publishing field, OMICS International of India, has improved the search engine for 700 journals. Hundreds of Canadian scientists were found to have published recently with the Indian firm — the same company that accepted this newspaper’s analysis of how pigs fly.

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.