Six officials at the Apex School of Theology orchestrated a scam to fraudulently claim $12 million in Federal student aid. The scheme involved recruiting fake students, forging fake applications for financial aid, as well as plagiarizing schoolwork and diplomas. FBI called the conspiracy a “blatant abuse of a Federally funded program” and “an insult to all taxpayers.

Universities in the USA use a variety of approaches to combat cheating, from advanced plagiarism detection software, legal action against companies offering paper-writing services to interviews with students suspected of contract cheating. In Canada, the Academic Integrity Council of Ontario brings together college officials twice a year to share best practices. Australia and New Zealand have similar legislation in place: prison sentences up to two years and heavy fines.

The study "Plagiarism and the Web" analyzed more than 33.5 million papers submitted to the Turnitin service from June 2010 to June 2011. In those papers, iParadigms' researchers found 128 million "content matches" from a wide variety of Web sources.

The frontier in the battle to defeat student cheating may be here at the testing center of the University of Central Florida. As the eternal temptation of students to cheat has gone high-tech – not just on exams, but also by cutting and pasting from the Internet and sharing of homework online like music files – educators have responded with their own efforts to crack down.

Northern Kentucky accused five professors of fabricating data in scholarly papers, duplicating large chunks of their own work in several papers, plagiarizing, and listing as authors a number of professors at the university who did not contribute.