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The Supreme Court of Pakistan has ordered the shutdown of illegal campuses of private universities across the country. Preston University and Al Khair University has set up illegal campuses in Karachi and Lahore and students approached the Higher Education Commission (HEC) because these universities were not issuing degrees. The Court directed the HEC to award degrees to the students who had passed out from illegal campuses through some special arrangement and implement these policies throughout the country.

Following the rapid transition to digital delivery that many institutions have had to navigate, there has been an increase in online services that help students cheat. A simple Google search for the term ‘assignment help’ returned 279 million results in mid-June 2020 and 302 million in early 2021. In Australia to help combat the problem, the Government has passed a law that makes it an offence to provide or advertise academic cheating services in higher education and published an academic integrity toolkit.

According to a new report, 11% of the assignments submitted by Australian university students were written by someone else. More than 95% of students who cheat in this way are never caught. A survey distributed to 4100 students at six universities found two types of contract cheating: paying someone else to write a paper or downloading it from a collection of pre-written assignments.

There have been reports of students in Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Bombay, IIT-Kharagpur, and IIT-Ropar using WhatsApp groups to share solutions to questions, and using breaks to call their peers during the examinations. A professor reports that 95% of students cheat. To prevent it, the Ministry of Education has established a committee to develop a common protocol for online internal examinations, and universities are considering the introduction of a code of honour.

172 cases of sexual harassment committed by students and staff have been reported in the past five years. A science professor left the university in September after sexual harassment allegations made by a female employee and NUS and the police launched investigations. However, in many cases, complaints might result in termination without disclosure, allowing the faculty member to secure a job elsewhere and continue his career.

As schools and universities move to online instruction, the new software Turnitin Originality is designed to support academic integrity by providing tools to students to self-check and correct themselves, and for professors to identify potential misconduct so that they can intervene. When reviewing submissions, Turnitin Originality checks whether the work is similar to other known text, or if there are indications that it was not written by the student. This data will facilitate conversations between instructors and students about how to discover and express their authentic voice.

The new Federal government-funded Education Integrity Unit will monitor academic misconduct at Australian Universities. Researchers report that between 6 and 10 per cent of students have cheated during their studies. The new academic Unit will address “emerging threats” to academic and research integrity, admission standards and information, student safety, foreign interference, cybersecurity, fraud, and corruption.

Many institutions in Australia provide training programmes for their Ph.D. students but these programmes vary in quality, content and reach. The temptation to judge a researcher’s performance for grant funding by the number of published research papers and the focus on the quantity over quality is very strong. They are not just driving bad behaviour for researchers but are also creating a market for criminals to enter scholarly publishing.