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Plagiarism could threaten the value of a degree from Oxford University as students increasingly copy large slabs of work from the internet and submit it as their own, the university warns. Many of the plagiarism cases that were referred to the proctor's office involved international students whose first language was not English.

Some language schools are being used to sell false papers, enabling immigrants to obtain student visas. Some are paying up to £600 for fake documents which they use in visa applications to extend their stay. More than half of 83 language colleges recently inspected could be shut down. Up to 50,000 students could be using such scams to stay illegally.

A university has excluded 50 foreign students it believes used forged certificates to enhance their applications. It said it regretted having to exclude the students because many of them appeared to be victims of bogus "agents", based either in China or Britain (49 students came from China and one from Taiwan), who were paid to submit applications, including supporting documents, on their behalf. The forgeries, mainly certificates for English language qualifications or degrees awarded by other universities, are of such high quality that they could not have been detected by the usual checks carried out by admissions officers. The university is introducing a number of changes to its admissions procedures, one of which will be to draw up and publish on its website a list of approved agents.

Many of the UK’s leading universities are refusing to spell out just how they are spending their students’ £9,000 (US$13,600) a year tuition fees. The influential think-tank, the Higher Education Policy Institute, invited a range of institutions to explain how they were spending the money - but the majority, including almost all the of the country’s most select universities, declined to reply.

Most students are happy to work hard, try their best and accept the consequences. But there are a host of commercial essay writers who are prepared to help those who can't be bothered. Universities have responded to the threat by trying to change the way they assess students. Increasingly students are being asked to orally present their work in front of a seminar group, or to answer questions from lecturers.

US public universities recorded about five cases of alleged cheating for every 100 foreign students, and only one for every 100 domestic students, in the 2014-15 academic year. In the United Kingdom students from overseas – from outside the European Union – are more than four times as likely to cheat. Many of these cheating students come from countries with endemic corruption or with significantly different academic cultures and standards. Universities should acknowledge this problem and allocate all necessary resources to mitigate academic misconduct involving students.

The number of students caught cheating at the UK’s top universities has shot up by a third in three years, with experts warning that institutions are ignoring the problem. A senior teaching fellow at Imperial College London and one of the UK’s leading experts on essay cheating, said: “A growing number of young people also feel more pressure than ever before, often turning to cheating to help them get through their degrees. It’s also easier to access websites that offer paid-to-order essays”.