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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.

India’s tough new anti-plagiarism law drawn up by the higher education regulatory body, the University Grants Commission or UGC, which sets out graded punishments depending on the seriousness of the misdemeanour, has been widely welcomed by academics – but many said there needs to be even stronger deterrence to curb copycat tendencies among students and lecturers. The UGC announced the Promotion of Academic Integrity and Prevention of Plagiarism in Higher Education Institutions Regulations 2018 late last month.

Hackers attempted to change grades at a Fairfax County high school, using a cunning attack that began with an email from a school panel charged with upholding honor and integrity, according to a search warrant. Oakton High School in Vienna, Va., is just the latest in a string of secondary schools, colleges and universities nationwide to be targeted — often by meddling students — in attempts to turn F’s into A’s in virtual grade books.

KU Leuven is currently investigating some 20 papers from the period 1999 to 2013 that would contain fraudulent images. Two papers have recently been withdrawn, one has been officially corrected. The investigation of the Committee for Academic Integrity is in a final phase. The articles that are under discussion come from the biomedical sciences. Three Leuven professors are a co-author of several indicated papers. In many cases, this was done in collaboration with colleagues from foreign institutions.

Early research findings on academic corruption suggest that accreditation and quality assurance bodies in some countries are having success in handling the problem, but questions about how to deal with the unwieldy issue remain a work in progress. And while the topic is complex and multifaceted, research on student attitudes towards cheating offers some insights into how an emphasis on integrity might reverse the problem, which has long been the scourge of the higher education accreditation profession.