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According to a professor from the National Universities Commission, 60% of essays by final-year undergraduates contained plagiarism, at masters’ level it was between 15-20% and at PhD level about 8% contained plagiarism. The vice-chancellor of Delta State University announced that in an attempt to instill academic discipline and honesty, the institution had sanctioned more than 15 lecturers for various forms of publication-related plagiarism. According to a source at the university, such sanctions involved demotions and no promotions for periods between three and five years.

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.

A survey of British institutions reveals that few have taken concrete steps to stop the much-criticized misuse of research metrics in the evaluation of academics’ work. The results offer an early insight into global efforts to clamp down on such practices.
DORA calls for panels responsible for academic promotion and hiring to stop misusing metrics such as the journal impact factor — which measures the average number of citations accumulated by papers in a given journal over two years — as a way to assess individual researchers. It urges panels to assess the content of papers and quality of research instead.

Kenya’s Commission for University Education has issued stringent new guidelines for the appointment and promotion of academic staff in a system that gives heavy emphasis to publication in reputable, peer-reviewed journals and discourages publication in so-called predatory journals. While the move is intended to raise academic standards, it has also raised concerns about the hurdles to publication facing many Kenyan academics.

In order to improve the quality of published research and to crack down on so-called ‘predatory’ academic publishers – who charge fees to authors but fail to provide adequate quality control, or make misleading claims about their quality – India’s University Grants Commission (UGC) has published lists of approved journals for publishing research papers. The UGC, a statutory body that oversees university education in India, has now linked academic promotions and recruitment to its system of Academic Performance Indicators which will only recognise papers published in journals that are on the approved lists.

The Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission, ICPC, in conjunction with the National Universities Commission, NUC, is set to beam its searchlight on corrupt practices in the Nigerian universities over a chain of petitions received by the anti-graft commission. Abuses highlighted include admission processes, conduct of examinations, appointments and promotion of staff, and manipulation and falsification of academic records such as transcripts.