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British medical authorities acknowledged on Monday that they were checking the credentials of some 3,000 foreign physicians after one was convicted of fraud and accused of falsifying qualifications. A physician used a qualification from her native New Zealand for more than two decades which enabled her to treat patients suffering from dementia and an array of other psychiatric complaints. However, in recent weeks, an investigation by a provincial newspaper uncovered a very different version of her background.

According to Slovak media the Speaker of the Slovakian Parliament has been accused of having copied his JuDR doctoral thesis in law from five other sources. The politician put his thesis in the university library under embargo, when the accusations first arose. Comenius University announced that a doctoral dissertation with the same title and same number of pages was missing in its university archive and that an enquiry has been launched.

Apparently, degrees from Aberdeen University and Robert Gordon University can be obtained for as little as £200, complete with university emblems and gold seals. It has emerged that copies of RGU degrees even contained faked signatures. Other institutions being targeted include St Andrews University, Glasgow University, and Edinburgh University. The information has come to light after a Sunday newspaper claimed that one website sold over 3,000 fake qualifications from various education establishments to UK-based buyers between 2013 and 2014. These included degrees, doctorates, and PhDs.

A student at Peking University, China’s top institution, has been allowed to return to the campus after being barred for days for asking questions about campus sexual harassment and rape cases dating back to the 1990s. A student at the School of Foreign Languages at Peking University (PKU), together with seven other students, had lodged a freedom of information request to the university on Shen Yang, a former PKU professor accused of sexual misconduct while at PKU in the 1990s. PKU has said in recent days it will do more to prevent sexual harassment, and that it had “zero tolerance” for violations of students’ rights.

KXAS-TV was awarded a 2017 Peabody Award for its extensive NBC 5 Investigates series, “Big Buses, Bigger Problems: Taxpayers Taken for a Ride”. NBC 5’s investigation exposed a web of corruption, staggering financial mismanagement, hidden personal relationships and conflicts of interest inside Dallas County Schools, a public agency responsible for transporting more than 75,000 school children daily in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

As another school year begins in Afghanistan, the country continues to face insecurity, an epidemic of corruption within its education system and old customs that keep many students and qualified teachers away from classrooms. Violence and corruption are problems that can hardly be solved on grassroots level only. Increased violence forced more than 1,000 schools to shut their doors since 2016 and according to a report compiled by the country’s independent corruption monitor, corruption is “devastating” the education system and the country.