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Maharashtra State Council of Examination Commissioner and two other accomplices were arrested for alleged involvement in malpractices in the Teachers Eligibility Test. The fraud committed was worth Rs 4.25 crore, and the candidates were asked to pay Rs 50,000 to Rs 1 lakh for passing the exam. A committee headed by Education Chief Secretary has been constituted to thoroughly investigate the case.

There have been reports of students in Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Bombay, IIT-Kharagpur, and IIT-Ropar using WhatsApp groups to share solutions to questions, and using breaks to call their peers during the examinations. A professor reports that 95% of students cheat. To prevent it, the Ministry of Education has established a committee to develop a common protocol for online internal examinations, and universities are considering the introduction of a code of honour.

A science teacher is accused of working in 25 Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya simultaneously for 13 months and taking home approximately Rs 1 crore as salary. The police arrested one of the multiple persons impersonating the science teacher, using her academic records. The minister of education ordered a probe into the records of all 746 residential schools for girls. A First Information Report on the charges of dishonesty, cheating by impersonation, forgery of valuable security, forgery for purpose of cheating, using a forged document, was lodged against her.

Police arrested eight persons who duped teacher-aspirants on the pretext of helping them crack the assistant teachers’ recruitment examination that was held to recruit 69,000 teachers in 2019. The aspirants gave Rs1 lakh as an advance while the remaining amount was to be given after declaration of results. Cash worth Rs 7.56 lakh, mark sheets of many aspirants, and other documents along with a diary containing details of candidates were recovered from the accused.

Mumbai University hands over 350 Ph.D. degrees annually to its students without any plagiarism detection test. Even though the “URKUND” software was made available for free by the University Grants Commission (UGC), the use of the software has not started yet. According to the UGC regulations, any similarity of over 10 per cent in two documents is considered plagiarism or duplication.

Following the University Grants Commission’s regulations for the promotion of academic integrity, Andhra University decided to implement a technology-based mechanism to prevent plagiarism. No thesis with a similarity index above 20% can be submitted. In addition, the students must submit an undertaking stipulating that their work is original.

Student researchers found guilty of plagiarism may lose their registration and teachers could lose their jobs as the HRD ministry approved new regulations on plagiarism drafted by the University Grants Commission (UGC) in New Delhi. In March this year, the UGC had approved the regulations prescribing graded punishment for plagiarism. In case the similarities are between 40% and 60%, students will be banned from submitting a revised paper for one year. A student's registration for a programme will be cancelled if the similarities are above 60%

The Supreme Court of India has dealt a serious blow to deemed universities granting degrees that are delivered by distance or correspondence learning without first obtaining mandatory permission from the statutory bodies. The court suspended the engineering degrees awarded to students on distance courses between 2001 and 2005 by three deemed universities; and annulled degrees granted by those institutions after 2005. It also issued a blanket restraint on all deemed universities obliging them not to carry on any course from the academic year 2018-19 “unless and until specific permissions are granted by the concerned statutory authorities”.

The crime branch of the Lucknow police busted a fake marksheet racket on Sunday and arrested four persons from a multi-storey complex on Hewett Road. The cops, however, disclosed the information on Monday. The police recovered around 400 fake marksheets, 800 papers used for printing them, rubber stamps of several fake examination boards, three laptops, five scanner-cum-printers, one CPU and 12 paper cutters. The gang was preparing fake marksheets for Class 10, 12 and graduation since 2012 and used to charge Rs 5,000 to 10,000 for each marksheet.