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A university has excluded 50 foreign students it believes used forged certificates to enhance their applications. It said it regretted having to exclude the students because many of them appeared to be victims of bogus "agents", based either in China or Britain (49 students came from China and one from Taiwan), who were paid to submit applications, including supporting documents, on their behalf. The forgeries, mainly certificates for English language qualifications or degrees awarded by other universities, are of such high quality that they could not have been detected by the usual checks carried out by admissions officers. The university is introducing a number of changes to its admissions procedures, one of which will be to draw up and publish on its website a list of approved agents.

A leaked e-mail from Manchester Metropolitan University shows how university staff are being urged to increase the number of top degree grades to keep pace with competing universities. The leaking of the e-mail provides further evidence of the concern among academics over the pressure to manipulate degree awards to improve the public image of universities and to make them more attractive to applicants. The number of students achieving a first class degree at UK universities has more than doubled since the mid-1990s.

Thousands of teenagers are trying to cheat their way into university by plagiarising stories and phrases from the internet. One in 20 of Britain's brightest young brains is copying material from the web according to a study done by the Universities and Colleges Admission Service. The study, which involved examining 50,000 personal statements, found that 5% used material from the internet, most from one free website, but direct copying of large chunks was rarer - less than 1%.

Almost a third of the polled students in Serbia said that they would bribe somebody if that was the only way to pass an exam, according to a survey conducted by the Students Union of Serbia. 69 % would cheat in their exams if it was certain they would not be caught, while 53 percent said they would not feel bad about the cheating. Seven in ten students said that corruption is involved in enrolment procedures, and 79% heard of cheating in the exams.

Despite a recent report from the government indicated that bribes paid in state universities total as much as 20 million lari ($10.9 million) per year, the plans to introduce national tests for university admission to make a more "fair" system with equal access and less corruption might be put on the shelves due to budget problems. According to Tbilisi State University only 20 % of the university's students managed to pass the school's entrance exams without paying bribes.

The Scottish Qualifications Authority will use sophisticated printing measures to combat diploma fraud. Results will be printed on heavy parchment paper containing secret markings known only to the printer and the awards body, making forgery more difficult. The British university admissions service admitted in 2004 that it had stopped 1,000 students from entering programs due to applications with fake qualifications.