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To increase the marketing of their services, essay mills are now using comparison websites. According to an expert on academic integrity and cheating, there are over a thousand sites on one comparison site. Many of these sites provide buy-one-get-one-free or loyalty schemes, and when students try to withdraw, they can become the victims of blackmail, targeted by fake legal letters. The UK Government is introducing legislation to ban essay mills and advertising for them, but as most are based overseas, experts fear they are beyond the reach of the legislation.

100,000 pupils have been missing from school rolls during the past two years. The Government has announced that a national register would be introduced to assess how many pupils were not in school across the country. The Schools White Paper announced that laws would be introduced to modernise how attendance is recorded, with a “national data solution” used to track attendance and provide a “safety net” for vulnerable pupils at risk of disappearing from school rolls.

Six vice-chancellors from Cambridge, Exeter and UCL have signed up to a pledge which commits universities to stop using legally binding non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) against students and staff who report sexual harassment. The Higher Education Minister stated that universities should end the use of NDAs which “buy victims’ silence” in sexual misconduct cases.

The Office for Students (OfS) has published a circular detailing minimum acceptable student outcomes which set thresholds for drop-out rates, course completion and graduate employment that universities and colleges will need to meet to avoid further investigation. According to Ofs, over 60,000 students on full-time undergraduate courses are currently enrolled at institutions in England that could be sanctioned for low quality and poor value for money.

According to the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, there are over 1,000 essay mills in operation in UK universities. The government announced that offering essay-writing services to students for a fee will become a criminal offence under plans to tackle cheating. Universities welcomed this decision and introduced codes of conduct with severe penalties for submitting work that is not a student's own.

As part of the government's crackdown on degree fraud, and to safeguard the international reputation of UK universities, 85 fake UK university websites have been shut down since 2015. Websites have also been found selling fake degree certificates from real universities: a BBC investigation in 2014 found a website selling the University of Kent for £500, which were described as for “novelty purposes, or as a replacement for lost diplomas”. Employers are encouraged to carefully vet the qualifications of any new employees as “The only way to stop these operators is to remove the demand”.

A former Harvard coach accepted $1.5m in bribes in exchange for helping a businessperson get his two sons into the Ivy League school as fencers. They face charges with conspiracy to take bribes under federal programmes. The coach was fired in July 2019 for violating Harvard’s conflict-of-interest policy.

According to a report carried out by Universities UK, the Higher education institutions should stop rounding up borderline marks and avoid discounting core or final-year modules. This comes in response to a warning from the Universities Minister that too many institutions felt pressured to lower their admission standards. The report sets out six measures to ensure transparency in the calculation of final grades and calls for a single algorithm to be used to calculate the final grade that the students receive.

According to academic integrity experts, online exams provide better access to information about student behaviour and are much more secure. Examiners can remotely access student computers to check for duplicates or unauthorized software. Impersonation is prevented by technology that recognizes students' faces and typing styles, while artificial intelligence is used to detect shadows that betray other people hidden in the room.