Search Page

Once comprehensively surveyed, the magnitude and reach of fraud is becoming clear. For example, research suggests that the majority of applications from a number of large student-sending countries are either significantly embellished or outright fraudulent. As a result, tens of thousands of international students, having passed through visa and admissions systems, are enrolled all over the world based on school transcripts, financial support statements, recommendation letters or test scores that are untrue.

In an effort to control increasing cases of plagiarism and low quality research, the All India Council for Technical Education, AICTE, is to launch Project Factory – an online repository aimed at capturing abstracts of all postgraduate projects.

The Italian cabinet has ordered the roll-out of a national accreditation scheme for academics to stamp out nepotism. Under the new scheme, commissions of five senior academics appointed in each university will accredit applicants for associate or full professorships on the basis of the quality and quantity of their academic output.

A world-renowned expert on the reduction of risks involved in heart surgery has been dismissed from Erasmus University Medical Centre in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, after violation of academic integrity. In one study it was found that he used patient data without permission, used fictitious data, and that two reports were submitted to conferences which included knowingly unreliable data.

Denmark has been rocked by a science fraud case involving a high-profile professor of medicine specialising in brain research. The case has also embroiled the rector of Copenhagen University, the previous minister of science and a number of co-authors, and has undermined the public view of science.

A member of the European Parliament has bowed to pressure from Germany's major higher education and research organisations and stepped down from her new post in the European Parliament's Committee on Industry, Research and Energy, following plagiarism accusations.

Weeks after Germany's defense minister was forced to resign in a plagiarism scandal, three German universities say they are investigating similar complaints about the academic work of three figures from the country's political sphere.

Makerere University has established a new policy that provides for the sacking of lecturers over drunkenness, writes Francis Kagolo for The New Vision. The policy, which seeks to boost academic standards, also requires lecturers to teach for a minimum of 10 hours a week and provide evidence that they carry out research.

There have been calls for Welsh universities to be more consistent in dealing with students who plagiarise. New figures show between 2008 and 2011, 927 students from six Welsh universities copied work.

The study "Plagiarism and the Web" analyzed more than 33.5 million papers submitted to the Turnitin service from June 2010 to June 2011. In those papers, iParadigms' researchers found 128 million "content matches" from a wide variety of Web sources.