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A good grade on the new SAT-style exams in Russia costs about 40,000 rubles. Could reform and crackdowns on corruption bring education back from the brink?

In one hour, and for about 38 dollars, you can get a false university degree in China, but the enforcement of punishment is making it ever more difficult to use such fraud to find a job or get into a foreign university. The measures introduced by China have curbed fraud and many fake degrees are now detected through authentication procedures; however, some genuine diplomas have been awarded to bogus students.

Four-week masters and doctorate degrees – and even undergraduate courses – are being offered over the Internet with no official recognition. Hence, the problem arises later when students seek admission to other universities, pass the entrance exam, but cannot enrol as their qualification is not recognised. In Latin America the demand for higher education is so great that people let themselves get sucked in.

Eight parents and teachers who used hi-tech equipment to help children cheat in Chinese college entrance exams have been sent to prison. They were given sentences of six months to three years after being found guilty of using mobile phones, tiny earpieces or mini scanners in order to obtain state secrets.

The University of Cauca uncovered what could be trickery in entrance exams to this year's first semester. It stated that the scores of 32 students in both assertive and non-assertive questions closely coincided. Among the doubtful candidates, 18 got into medicine, 4 into nursing, 2 into physiotherapy, and 2 into civil engineering.

In 2007, Transparency International gave Vietnam a dismal 2.6 rating score on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being least corrupt. Corruption is epidemic in Vietnam: bribes for school entrance, exams, and assessment occurs every day. Corruptive practices are the norm rather than the exception. In the informal survey of classes, more than 95 percent of the students reported they had cheated at least once in a class, and all had observed situations of cheating by other students.

A university has excluded 50 foreign students it believes used forged certificates to enhance their applications. It said it regretted having to exclude the students because many of them appeared to be victims of bogus "agents", based either in China or Britain (49 students came from China and one from Taiwan), who were paid to submit applications, including supporting documents, on their behalf. The forgeries, mainly certificates for English language qualifications or degrees awarded by other universities, are of such high quality that they could not have been detected by the usual checks carried out by admissions officers. The university is introducing a number of changes to its admissions procedures, one of which will be to draw up and publish on its website a list of approved agents.

Makarere University, in Uganda, one of the most prestigious universities in Africa may revoke 200 degrees awarded in the past years after an internal committee charged with investigating academic fraud, discovered that students have been enrolled without any evidence that they met admissions criteria.