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According to the Head of the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA), essay mills have become “public health and safety issue”, affecting all of society. As a result of students cheating in their degrees, there will be people entering into professions who are not qualified to carry out the work that is required. This practice is spreading now to the sixth-formers going to essay mills to get through their coursework at school.

The Institute of Business Economics’ rector and deputy are charged with fraud, forging of documents and their sale, commercial bribery, and mediation. One of the Institute applicants said that the admissions office offered her to pay 450 thousand rubles ($7,054) for three years of study. The fact that the university was deprived of its license two years earlier did not prevent the rector from concluding contracts with candidates for paid higher education.

According to a report published by the Council for Higher Education Accreditation and the International Quality Group, corruption in higher education vary between countries but it highlights unethical, inappropriate, and illegal practices. Some examples include university leaders and professors with fake or undeserved doctoral degrees impacting on the governance of some Russian universities, ‘ghost advising’ or absenteeism by senior academics, delegating their responsibilities for teaching or supervision to junior colleagues or research students, is widespread in Kosovo, or students and teachers sexually harassing, threatening or harming academic teaching staff in Uganda.

The Supreme Court of India has dealt a serious blow to deemed universities granting degrees that are delivered by distance or correspondence learning without first obtaining mandatory permission from the statutory bodies. The court suspended the engineering degrees awarded to students on distance courses between 2001 and 2005 by three deemed universities; and annulled degrees granted by those institutions after 2005. It also issued a blanket restraint on all deemed universities obliging them not to carry on any course from the academic year 2018-19 “unless and until specific permissions are granted by the concerned statutory authorities”.

The independent quality body for higher education in the United Kingdom, the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education or QAA, has issued new guidance on how to combat 'contract cheating', where students pay a company or individual to produce work that they then pass off as their own. The companies involved – typically using a website to promote themselves and receive orders – are often dubbed ‘essay mills’, but services provided may include not just essays or other assignments, but conducting research and impersonation in exams. While there is a common perception that students studying in another language are more likely to cheat than domestic students, there is currently “no UK data to support this view”.

According to a confidential report, Kenya’s universities are facing serious management challenges resulting in admission flaws, inadequate staffing, and low standards of examination administration, supervision and research. The report also shows that some institutions cut corners to increase admissions in order to seal budgetary gaps, allow students to graduate within months, or admit students to unaccredited programmes from which they are then allowed to graduate. After returning their reports with factual corrections done, the institutions in question will have 30 days to issue corrective roadmap.