Search Page

According to the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, there are over 1,000 essay mills in operation in UK universities. The government announced that offering essay-writing services to students for a fee will become a criminal offence under plans to tackle cheating. Universities welcomed this decision and introduced codes of conduct with severe penalties for submitting work that is not a student's own.

According to a report carried out by Universities UK, the Higher education institutions should stop rounding up borderline marks and avoid discounting core or final-year modules. This comes in response to a warning from the Universities Minister that too many institutions felt pressured to lower their admission standards. The report sets out six measures to ensure transparency in the calculation of final grades and calls for a single algorithm to be used to calculate the final grade that the students receive.

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19, the HEC business school has introduced an online monitoring system for exams that detects the slightest move and tracks down suspected cheaters. The National Commission for Information Technology and Civil Liberties, seized by students from several higher education institutions, will ensure the legality of these virtual monitors.

To guarantee the academic integrity and legitimacy of the evaluations and exams during the health crisis of COVID-19, Madrid Complutense University was able to take advantage of their existing remote digital media. To avoid fraud, the identity of students during oral exams is verified using video-conferencing tools, and access codes are personal and non-transferable. This is done under the oversight of the Computer Services department. For handwritten tests, students send a scanned handwritten text to the University Virtual Campus.

The Corruption Prevention and Combating Bureau (KNAB) detained Riga City Council deputy and University of Latvia deputy rector for accepting a bribe of 20 000 euros. KNAB has discovered information that proves the state official, while in the post of procurement committee’s deputy chairperson had accepted a bribe from businessmen, registering it as a donation to an association.