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The Minister of Education announced that cheats selling their services to Australian university students would face two years imprisonment or fines of up to AU$100,000. Students who cheat will also be subject to their institutions’ own academic integrity policies and sanctions. The Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency will be empowered to request legal measures to force internet service providers and search engines to block cheating websites.

Following the University Grants Commission’s regulations for the promotion of academic integrity, Andhra University decided to implement a technology-based mechanism to prevent plagiarism. No thesis with a similarity index above 20% can be submitted. In addition, the students must submit an undertaking stipulating that their work is original.

In an interview with a local daily newspaper, Malaysia’s Education Minister said that efforts are underway to do a large-scale change in the world of academia. A review of the Statuary Bodies (Discipline and Surcharge) Act 605 to exclude academics from several rules governing civil servants will be carried out. This involves issues of academic freedom, integrity, plagiarism, and others.

The recent steps taken by the UK government to end the use of essay mills by its students is a blow to thousands of Kenyan students and university graduates who rely on academic contract writing as their main source of income. An integrity expert tells in his blog that the participants think of their jobs as providing a service of value, not as helping people to cheat. They see themselves as working as academic writers but this practice is considered unethical and there are concerns it will have damaging effects on the quality of higher education.

The University Grants Commission (UGC) implemented new regulations in order to prevent plagiarism and academic misconduct by students. They required every institution to establish a mechanism to enhance awareness about responsible conduct of research and academic activities, promotion of academic integrity and deterrence from plagiarism. The ministry of human resource development told a meeting of vice-chancellors that plagiarism software would be provided free to all institutions. However, similarity-detection is only possible if the original material is available online. And plagiarism is not just about text similarity, but also recycling of copied figures, tables, and photographs.

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.