Twelve people have been sentenced to four years of prison after posing as students to take a Cambridge University-affiliated business English exam. The head of the criminal network is a former English teacher who has set up his exam preparation agency. Students were paired with similar-looking candidates so that their faces could be digitally blended to produce images that were then overlaid on the students' actual ID cards.

Between 1999 and 2006, 242 graduates in the Eastern Shandong province enrolled at universities using other people’s identities and college entrance scores. According to reports, dozens of people have been punished, but under existing laws, students cannot be charged with a crime. The National People’s Congress has received a proposal to criminalize exam fraud, and the Ministry of Education will work with authorities to investigate and hold students accountable.

There has been an increasing number of cases of academic dishonesty among senior scientists in China. A 2018 report by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences states that there were 64 cases of academic dishonesty between 2007 and 2017. At least 10 scientists were charged in 2016. These incidents occurred at 46 universities and one national research institute.

The Hunan University of Technology in central China introduced a new free tool to limit plagiarism on campuses. Students could check their final dissertation with an online database to see how much of each paper’s content is copied from existing publications. A former director of the People’s Liberation Army’s Institute for Disease Control and Prevention plagiarised the work of another Ph.D. student in his final thesis. He was stripped of his doctorate after being found guilty of cheating 12 years after receiving.

The authors who accused a website of selling their dissertations against their consent cannot demand the removal of the thesis from the platform as the sale does not constitute copyright infringement, intellectual property experts said. Many of the graduates, who said their dissertations are being sold without consent, added that the website is infringing their intellectual property rights and causing psychological and economic damages. However, unless the authors can prove that these copies are pirated, they cannot demand the shop owners to stop selling the copies.

The research ethics of China’s scientists has come under the spotlight after a major international publisher retracted 107 medical research papers by Chinese authors – the single largest number of retractions ever recorded – after discovering irregularities in the peer review process. The Springer Nature publishing company said the papers were published in the journal Tumor Biology between 2012 and 2016. “After a thorough investigation we have strong reason to believe that the peer review process was compromised,” the publisher said. The latest move by Springer constitutes the single largest withdrawal of academic papers, according to the Retraction Watch website which monitors academic fraud.

A major Chinese education company has paid thousands of dollars in perks or cash to admissions officers at top U.S. universities to help students apply to American schools. According to eight former employees the company’s services didn’t end there. Employees engaged in practices such as writing application essays for students, altering recommendation letters and modifying grades on high school transcripts. The company’s success in gaining access to leading American colleges underscores how people on both sides of the Pacific are hungry to capitalize on Chinese students’ desire to study in the United States.

To ensure the healthy development of academia, there has to be fundamental changes made to China’s academic incentive system with a move away from the current method of judging researchers through the number of publications they have in ranked journals. This method leads some to chase after numbers while ignoring academic integrity. With deep roots in Chinese cultural traditions and a fertile soil that nourishes corruption, China’s battle against research misconduct is doomed to be arduous.

China is warning its students to steer clear of fake universities. An information website has published a list of 30 such institutions following the annual college entry exam in June. This is the sixth such list in existence. Apparently, faking an entire educational institution isn’t all that difficult. And authorities say they’re becoming harder to spot. No less than a dozen provinces and regions – including Beijing and Shanghai - were mentioned in a list by sdaxue.com, an education information website, according to Xinhua. Some 30 fake universities were mentioned, compounding an already fat list of 400 since 2013.