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A survey of 2,000 university students and 500 employees conducted by the Center for the Development of Youth Activism (CROA), found every fourth student has had an encounter with corruption - such as paying for a better grade. In addition to bribes and coerced textbook purchases, some students were pressured to join political parties and extorted for sexual favours. CROA is not only passing on the complaints to universities for a follow-up investigation, but is also planning anti-corruption training for professors, staff, and students. And it is working to include conflict of interest in universities’ codes of ethics.

Six Iranian and Azerbaijani nationals have been arrested for stealing and selling questions and answers from the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) that foreign students take for admission to universities in the United States and Turkey. The suspects allegedly charged the “buyers” between $2,000 and $3,000 for the questions provided in their network called “quarantine houses”. While searching the addresses where the suspects were arrested, Turkish police found SAT admission papers, official test question books and a host of digital evidence.

A forger spotted in 2019 by the Ministry of Higher Education has been charged with forgery, counterfeiting and sale of official documents, fraud and money laundering. Since 2015, he had been selling fake diplomas by the thousands at €200 each. With the complicity of a taxi-ambulance driver who photographed patients' documents, he bought pre-paid cards under these false identities, which were then paid for by electronic transfers by the purchasers of the false diplomas via their own pre-paid cards.

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.

As part of the government's crackdown on degree fraud, and to safeguard the international reputation of UK universities, 85 fake UK university websites have been shut down since 2015. Websites have also been found selling fake degree certificates from real universities: a BBC investigation in 2014 found a website selling the University of Kent for £500, which were described as for “novelty purposes, or as a replacement for lost diplomas”. Employers are encouraged to carefully vet the qualifications of any new employees as “The only way to stop these operators is to remove the demand”.

The Austrian minister of labour resigned from her cabinet post after allegations that her university work was fraudulent. An expert in academic fraud detection reported that her 2006 master’s thesis displayed “plagiarism, incorrect quotations and lack of knowledge of the German language”. More than a fifth of the text in the thesis she submitted last May at the Technical University of Bratislava, had been taken from other sources without quotes, including an article in Forbes magazine.

A Nottingham teacher has collected 3,800 reports on corruption in the international school system that deal with nepotism, fraud, and cheating. In England, they highlight structural "reform", with its waste of money on free schools that never open, the horrific ongoing costs of successive Private Finance Initiatives (PFIs), and the way schools are pitched against each other to survive. Examples include an academy boss telling teachers to cheat on exams and the widespread relocation of students to improve school performance.

During online tests, the Ghent University received a warning that cheating had occurred and that students shared correct answers using online channels. After further examination of the evidence, the university declared all four tests invalid including those students who did not cheat. The students responsible for organizing the fraud will be sanctioned, scored zero out of 20, and excluded from any resits.