Search Page

Kazakhstan’s anti-corruption strategies are showing early signs of progress, a top official at the country’s Agency for Civil Service Affairs and Fighting Corruption said. Among the cited projects was Sanaly Urpak (Conscious Generation), established in Almaty, which seeks to minimise corruption in the education system. The project has developed an optimal solution for curbing corruption at the secondary and higher education level, as well as disseminating the academic honesty principle. University academic integrity and cohesion ratings will be issued annually based on project estimates.

The assessment watchdog Ofqual figures for the 2017-2018 academic year show 1,539 penalties for malpractice in vocational qualifications, of which 55 per cent were for students, 39 per cent for staff, and 6 per cent for schools and colleges. There were 606 penalties issued to staff, with the most common offense being “improper assistance to candidates”, which accounted for 75 per cent of all penalties. Only 7 per cent of penalties for staff came in the form of suspensions or bans. In 45 per cent of cases, staff received a written warning, while 41 per cent of the penalties involved further training. The most common type of cheating reported was plagiarism, which accounted for 46 per cent of all student penalties, followed by in the use of mobile phones or other communication devices in exams, accounted for 19 per cent.

The founder and director of the St. Louis College Prep Charter School pleaded guilty to three counts of wire fraud connected to a scheme to defraud and obtain education funds from the State of Missouri. From 2011 through 2018, he inflated student attendance numbers by falsely claiming regular school days and hours as summer school or remedial hours, siphoning $2,400,000 from a finite pool of education dollars.

A number of school heads planned to defraud the government by providing lists of non-existing teachers, which delayed the release of the funds to pay teachers and other staff employed by the Boards of Management (BoM). The Minister of Education asked principals to collect and submit the right data of BoM teachers employed including names, the Teachers Service Commission number, and the country they belong to.

An audit reveals that Indiana Virtual School and Indiana Virtual Pathways Academy wrongly received $68.7 million in state payments by improperly claiming students as enrolled between 2011 and 2019 even though they had no online course activity. The two schools operated under shared administration and declared 7,200 students last year. However, they closed last summer after national officials cut off funding.