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Ways in which students cheat are either ingenious or surprisingly obvious. Why do students cheat, and risk having to retake a module, having their degree classification lowered, or even being kicked out of university? There are many reasons – including financial pressure, poor organisational skills and panic – sometimes among young people who should never have gone to university in the first place or, at the very least, who should have had more support structures in place when they started.

The National Universities Commission (NUC) has announced the existence of no fewer than forty-one illegal universities. These institutions have existed for years and fleeced unsuspecting members of the public of their hard earned resources in the guise of providing them with higher education.

Students from the University of New England may have their degrees stripped from them if they're found guilty of cheating, and may also lose their Australian residency visa. The university has checked more than 200 master projects and found that a significant proportion of fee-paying foreign students had been involved in plagiarism.

The Parliament has decided that schools cannot charge any money from students benefiting from the Universal Secondary Education scheme. The committee also wanted answers on examination malpractices, leakages and cancelled 'O' level results. It decided that when a candidate is deemed to have cheated in one paper, the candidate loses the whole examination.

The West African Examinations Council says it has not recorded any case of examination leakage in five years. It also denied knowledge of the existence of "special exam centers". The centers were allegedly created by some principals and secondary school proprietors for their candidates who are compelled to pay fees higher than the official fees charged by WAEC. The money is reportedly used for lobbying officials of the council to release the examination question papers to the centers ahead of the official time of the examination.