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.

Trinity College Dublin, Ireland’s oldest and highest ranked university, has been censured by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), for breaching the rules of its global ranking by running a campaign which they “clearly forbid”. Trinity, which along with other Irish universities has dropped down the rankings in recent years, launched an awareness campaign designed to ensure that its research is put in the spotlight and make sure key players are aware of upcoming surveys.

Although there has been an enormous expansion in higher education in India over the past 30 years there is still a huge problem around quality. In 2013 the Indian government launched a new higher education improvement programme. Australian universities can help by: training staff, rooting out corruption, sharing knowledge on access, and establishing research partnerships.

Ukraine has little to offer international students. The quality of education offered is low, there is endless red tape and corruption is rife. Over the past quarter century, the quality of education offered has dropped dramatically due not only to a lack of state funding and a consequent brain drain, but primarily to rampant endemic corruption. Failed structural reforms and institutional incapacity in higher education have left Ukrainian youth without any hope of receiving world-class education and have had a negative impact on international students as well.

The National Commission on Higher Education says students seeking enrollment in universities in the country should inquire whether such institutions are registered with the Ministry of Education. The commission’s Director General said these fake or substandard universities offer degrees in various professions at poor quality to students.

Since his election in 2004, the Georgian president has set about reforming the endemically corrupt university system through drastic, but effective, measures. Reforms targeted both the admissions process as well as the quality of higher education itself.

Banishing academic dishonesty could help Mozambique nurture original thinkers who are economically efficient and socially suited to develop the country. But this will only be possible if administrators work with professors and students to build strong measures to combat widespread plagiarism, which is hampering the production of quality graduates.

Accreditors keep hundreds of schools with low graduation rates or high loan defaults alive. Most colleges can’t keep their doors open without an accreditor’s seal of approval, which is needed to get students access to federal loans and grants. But accreditors hardly ever kick out the worst-performing colleges and lack uniform standards for assessing graduation rates and loan defaults.

A government-commissioned study of the placement of Norwegian universities in global rankings – in particular compared to other Nordic institutions – has concluded that even the top rankings are so based on subjective weightings of factors and on dubious data that they are useless as a basis for information if the goal is to improve higher education.