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.

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.

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.