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Hackers attempted to change grades at a Fairfax County high school, using a cunning attack that began with an email from a school panel charged with upholding honor and integrity, according to a search warrant. Oakton High School in Vienna, Va., is just the latest in a string of secondary schools, colleges and universities nationwide to be targeted — often by meddling students — in attempts to turn F’s into A’s in virtual grade books.

The Department of Homeland Security arrested 21 people Tuesday on charges that they had recruited thousands of students through the promise of fraudulently obtained visas. At the center of the arrests was the University of Northern New Jersey, the brainchild of federal agents who masqueraded as representatives of a for-profit university to ensnare the recruiters.

Twenty-one people have been arrested after US authorities set up a fake university to expose immigration fraud. Officials said the accused knew that the University of Northern New Jersey did not exist, but they were unaware it was a ruse run by immigration agents. The defendants acted as brokers for more than 1,000 foreigners who sought to maintain student and work visas, prosecutors said. Most foreign nationals involved in the scheme came from China and India.

In October 2015, a New York district court ruled in favor of the academic publisher Elsevier, which had accused Sci-Hub, a website that offers pirated versions of academic papers, of copyright violation. That decision allowed authorities to take down the site’s domain name, sci-hub.org. Suspending a domain name does not delete a website forever, though, it just prevents visitors from knowing where exactly to find it. It’s trivial enough to relaunch the same site under another domain, as Sci-Hub did.

A former Iowa State University researcher who fabricated the results of an experimental HIV vaccine was sentenced to four years and nine months in prison recently. He was also ordered to pay US$7.2 million to the US National Institutes of Health that funded the research.

An eight-month investigation by former federal prosecutor Kenneth L. Wainstein has found that more than 3100 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill students – almost half of them athletes — were given credit for "irregular" (read: nonexistent) classes over an 18-year period from 1993-2011 as part of a organized scheme that allowed many to remain sports-eligible.

Thirty-five former school officials have been implicated in a test cheating scandal, and have been given a deadline to surrender to authorities in the state of Georgia. The accused in the city of Atlanta face counts of racketeering, making false statements and conspiring to improve test scores to win cash bonuses.

Last year, the ombudsman for Andalusia received 150 complaints over the enrolment process, according to the 2008 report just published. This is why he favours harsher penalties for fraudulent applications as there are no clear-cut punitive measures that set an example. However, the province's education ministry maintains that punishment is not the best response, so no sanctions will be taken.