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Pretoria – A task team has been set up to investigate how a Life Sciences matric exam paper was leaked in Limpopo, the Basic Education Minister announced on Tuesday. The task team will be charged with establishing the source of the security breach as well as the spread of the access to the question paper. Among the possible outcomes of the scale of the leak is that learners at the affected school could be asked to rewrite the exam.

Several universities are being threatened with tough penalties for allegedly providing data that would artificially boost their performance on prestigious research rankings used to allocate government funding. The Australian Research Council has written stern letters to several universities warning them they face punishments for providing misleading data for their research excellence assessments, including prosecution under Commonwealth law.

Government’s plan to draft in a policy to target qualification fraud is expected to reap positive results for South Africa, including ensuring that South African tertiary institutions are not robbed of the reverence many of them have earned for decades. One of the main benefits would be that CV verification will become standardised, ensuring accuracy and no room for deviation, in both the public and private sectors.

The Mozambican Minister of Education declared “zero tolerance” of academic fraud in reaction to the latest cheating scandal concerning the 12th grade extraordinary examinations held in August. An investigation into 43 of the country's 200 public secondary schools confirmed that cheating had taken place in nine schools, involving 407 pupils

The Maputo City Court on Thursday sentenced eight people to prison terms of between one and 20 years for their part in a fraud which had diverted 33 million meticais (about 825,000 US dollars at current exchange rates) from the coffers of the Ministry of Education between 2008 and 2011.