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A well-known obesity researcher will plead guilty to making material false statements in a 1999 grant application worth $542,000 from the US National Institutes of Health. The researcher, who held various research positions at the University of Vermont (UVM) College of Medicine in Burlington could go to jail for up to 5 years.

The Department of Education has launched a website which features a list of 6,900 academic institutions accredited by an accrediting agency or state approval agency. The website is designed to help employers distinguish between accredited institutions of higher education and unaccredited institutions commonly as "diploma mills" that offer bogus degrees.

A federal grand jury in Kansas indicted a former college-basketball coach last month on charges that he arranged for his players to receive phony academic credit and stole $120,000 in Pell Grants. The former coach faces a total of 51 years in prison and over $1.5-million in fines if found guilty of all counts.

People in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda have been found buying fake degrees of all sorts from diploma mills and other bogus universities. Those universities have no physical existence and operate only through websites. Most diploma mills are operating from Britain or United States where academic standards are presumed to be very high. Recently, the Federal Bureau of Investigations compiled a list of over 10,000 persons who obtained fake degrees from diploma mills in USA. A significant number of them are from South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria. Currently, there are about 80 notorious diploma mills that operate from the United States and the UK.

Before assigning term papers for literature composition class at Gavilan College in Gilroy, Steve Schessler takes time to discuss something that has tormented teachers from the beginning of time – or at least the beginning of homework assignments. The subject he broaches is plagiarism, and a show of hands reveals that his students are not exactly clear on the concept.

Although Chinese students have been going to America to study for decades, their numbers have grown dramatically in the past few years. Many of them have only a basic knowledge of foreign universities and difficulty making sense of complicated applications. As a result, a huge industry of education agents has arisen in the country to help guide them — and, in some cases, to do whatever it takes to ensure that they are accepted.

The frontier in the battle to defeat student cheating may be here at the testing center of the University of Central Florida. As the eternal temptation of students to cheat has gone high-tech – not just on exams, but also by cutting and pasting from the Internet and sharing of homework online like music files – educators have responded with their own efforts to crack down.

Could student plagiarism actually be reduced? And could it be reduced not through fear of being caught, but through... education? The evidence in a study released earlier in January suggests that the answer to both questions is 'yes' - which could be welcome news to academics who constantly complain about students who either don't know what plagiarism is or do not follow the rules about the integrity of assignments.

The study "Plagiarism and the Web" analyzed more than 33.5 million papers submitted to the Turnitin service from June 2010 to June 2011. In those papers, iParadigms' researchers found 128 million "content matches" from a wide variety of Web sources.

A tell-all blog post by a New York University professor claims that more than 20 business students at the elite private university plagiarized portions of the work they submitted for one of his classes. Criticism by students in their evaluation of the professor resulted in a financial penalty for him, he says.