Search Page

It’s raining As in America’s higher education system, and not necessarily because students are particularly smart. In fact, many of them probably don’t deserve the high marks they’re getting. They have grade inflation to thank. That inflation is rapidly spreading to higher education institutions across the country. Despite stagnant academic performance, more students than ever before receive higher grades than they should.

The president and CEO of a private college that catered to foreign students has been sentenced to 16 years in prison for defrauding the Department of Homeland Security by issuing phony visa-related documents to international students in exchange for tuition and fee.

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.

The agent debate is dead. Long live the integrity debate. For some time now, the discussion about whether American colleges could use commission-based agents when recruiting students abroad has been the hottest of hot-button issues in international admissions, with each camp staking out fiercely partisan positions.

In this article, Dr John Richard Schrock, who teaches at Emporia State University in Kansas, explains the vast differences between research, citation and teaching styles in Chinese and American university students, citing cultural and education gaps for instances of plagiarism.

Private supplementary tutoring in pre-university education is defined as tutoring in academic subjects provided by tutors for financial gain in addition to the provision of mainstream schooling. A researcher from Lehigh University raises concerns about private tutoring and provides examples of situations where it is not used to complement mainstream schooling but instead replaces it.

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.

Easy A's may be even easier to score these days, with the growing popularity of online courses. Technologically advanced students are finding ways to cheat that let them ace online courses with minimal effort, in ways that are difficult to detect.

The State Board of Higher Education is working to tighten admission policies for international students after an audit found some Chinese student transcripts submitted to Dickinson State University were fakes.

The detection of wholesale cheating in college applications is on the rise due to the use of Turnitin for Admissions, an anti-plagiarism database service that compares student essays to an immense archive of other writings. Around the country, more than 100 colleges and universities have adopted it, mainly in graduate divisions, although Stanford University is among the dozen schools starting to use it for freshman applicants this year.