To prevent the leakage of question papers and other malpractices, the West African Examination Council (WAEC) has tightened the security of the ongoing West African Senior School Certificate Examination. Ten cases of breaches of WAEC rules were identified, including people linked to rogue websites, while the suspects in three cases were convicted and fined by the court. According to the head of Public Affairs of WAECA, schools accused of malpractice will be monitored and confidential material and examination papers will be stored.

13 staff members at the Ministry of Education have been dismissed in the Zambezi region after they were found guilty of claiming N$9 million in cash bonuses and additional payments. In order to improve payroll administration and identify any irregularity on the Ministry's payroll, a nationwide annual verification exercise is carried out.

A former director and two former deputy directors of Dong Do University in Vietnam were prosecuted for issuing hundreds of fake degrees and illegally earning more than US$310,000. The indictment also points out that the Ministry of Education and Training failed to carry out its responsibilities in monitoring the implementation of regulations on university enrolment and training.

A science teacher is accused of working in 25 Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya simultaneously for 13 months and taking home approximately Rs 1 crore as salary. The police arrested one of the multiple persons impersonating the science teacher, using her academic records. The minister of education ordered a probe into the records of all 746 residential schools for girls. A First Information Report on the charges of dishonesty, cheating by impersonation, forgery of valuable security, forgery for purpose of cheating, using a forged document, was lodged against her.

The T.M. Landry College Preparatory School in Louisiana is under federal investigation over its college admissions practices, transcripts with fake grades, non-existent school clubs and fictitious classes. Many students accused the founder of the school of abusing them and falsifying their transcripts. The court records reveal that he was accused of choking and dragging a student. In the investigation, the founder said that wall-sits and kneeling were used to motivate students and prepare them for the challenges of the real world.

The Supreme Court of India has dealt a serious blow to deemed universities granting degrees that are delivered by distance or correspondence learning without first obtaining mandatory permission from the statutory bodies. The court suspended the engineering degrees awarded to students on distance courses between 2001 and 2005 by three deemed universities; and annulled degrees granted by those institutions after 2005. It also issued a blanket restraint on all deemed universities obliging them not to carry on any course from the academic year 2018-19 “unless and until specific permissions are granted by the concerned statutory authorities”.

Tanzania’s flagship University of Dar es Salaam is under investigation by the parliamentary Public Accounts Committee for the mismanagement of university funds. An audit report for the 2014-15 and 2015-16 fiscal years presented to the parliamentary committee earlier this month shows that approximately US$0.5 million was lost on unretired imprest from workers and US$0.2 million on salaries to ghost workers at the university. The committee chairperson suggested that poor financial management at the university was behind the losses.

The Federal Government says it will immediately begin to investigate universities operating multiple accounts in violation of the Treasury Single Account policy of the government in order to checkmate corrupt practices in the nation’s universities, adding that concrete efforts would be made to protect whistleblowers in the country as part of the ongoing anti- corruption crusade. The government also said it intends to find an alternative means of sourcing funds for the revitalisation of infrastructure in the universities.

As part of its drive to clamp down on excessive tutoring and elite private schools that prepare students for the best universities, the South Korean government has ordered almost a dozen universities to revamp their admissions tests to bring them more in line with the normal high school curriculum. The ministry of education has said it will look into punishing the universities who have violated the regulations, including a partial ban on recruiting students for the 2019 academic year. Meanwhile, the Korean Council for University Education found that more than 1,500 college admission essays submitted to universities last year were suspected of being plagiarised.