A Melbourne start-up has created anti-plagiarism software which is being trialled at four major Australian universities. It's called Cadmus and it tracks students as they complete assignments. The editing and authentication software – which operates like a Google document and can be accessed anywhere – uses keystroke analytics to build up a profile of a student's typing style. This allows it to detect when someone else is dishonestly involved in their work.

Students have “no understanding” of what plagiarism is and why they must avoid it, according to new research. An education research fellow at the University of Otago, finds that universities might need to consider their plagiarism policies and how they might “influence or confuse students in counterproductive ways”. The qualitative study, published in the journal Higher Education, found that although “aware of plagiarism as a concept” and believing that those who “intentionally cheat are cheating everybody”, students were ignorant of the potential implications of unintentional plagiarism.

Freshmen to universities with financial autonomy have called on the universities to publicise tuition fees so that they and their families can manage the sum actively. A local newspaper on Friday reported that some universities “forget” to publicise tuition fees, which made students and their families confused and worried about transparency at the universities. In the middle of last month, second-year students at the National Economics University were shocked when the university announced a 30 per cent increase in tuition fees in the coming academic year.

Cheating by students who use essay mills is “virtually undetectable”, according to a study that found that many ghost-written papers would receive good marks if they were submitted. An associate lecturer in history at the University of New South Wales, conducted an experiment in which she ordered essays from 13 ghostwriting websites and then had them graded by leading academics who believed that they were looking at genuine student submissions. The results were “alarming”, with the quality of purchased essays being “higher than expected”; The use of essay mills might therefore be “much, much higher” than previously thought.

The Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) is in talks with HRD Ministry, CBSE, AICTE, Medical Council of India (MCI) and other educational bodies to introduce course content on corruption and ethics to make the students aware of the scourge and its consequences. If implemented, students in schools and colleges will soon be imparted lessons on the menace of corruption, its debilitating impact on socio-economic sphere and ways of tackling it.

In the season of examination results and college admissions, we are again reminded of the dismal condition of the Indian education system. The Punjab School Education Board has, in an act of benevolence, granted 30 grace marks to Class 12 students. This helped lift the state’s pass percentage from 54% to 76%. In Gujarat, the pass percentage in Class 10 dropped from 73% in 2014-15 to 63% this year — which the state education minister attributes to the installation of CCTV cameras in examination centres that have checked cheating. Many Class 10 students in Gujarat could not answer elementary questions in a retest, despite securing over 80% in the objective section of the mathematics paper.

Some 34 percent of academic theses in Turkey have high plagiarism rates, according to a report by the Education Policy Research and Application Center (BEPAM) of Istanbul’s Boğaziçi University. In its study on the “quality of academic writing,” BEPAM examined 600 theses in total, including 470 master’s theses and 130 doctoral theses written between 2007 and 2016. The study revealed “heavy plagiarism” in 34 percent of the theses. The rate was 46 percent in private universities and 31 percent in public universities.

China is warning its students to steer clear of fake universities. An information website has published a list of 30 such institutions following the annual college entry exam in June. This is the sixth such list in existence. Apparently, faking an entire educational institution isn’t all that difficult. And authorities say they’re becoming harder to spot. No less than a dozen provinces and regions – including Beijing and Shanghai - were mentioned in a list by sdaxue.com, an education information website, according to Xinhua. Some 30 fake universities were mentioned, compounding an already fat list of 400 since 2013.

The government plans to bring in a law to stop rampant plagiarism in academia, with punishment ranging from a warning to deregistration in the case of students and dismissal from service for teachers. Higher education regulator University Grants Commission (UGC) is finalising a draft law — the first of its kind — that is likely to be sent to the human resource development ministry for further action by June-end. Official sources said the government intends to seek parliamentary approval for the law this year itself.

In the latest education scam from Bihar, it appears that students can purchase top-scoring intermediate certificates for around Rs 5 lakh without even having to write the exam. Moreover, many schools and colleges have been getting their affiliations by improper means. All these skeletons are tumbling out in the light of probes launched after a TV sting found this year’s top-scoring students struggling to answer basic questions about their subjects. Most memorably, one top student said that political science is about cooking. The rot in the state of education has certainly been a long time cooking.