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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.

The frontier in the battle to defeat student cheating may be here at the testing center of the University of Central Florida. As the eternal temptation of students to cheat has gone high-tech – not just on exams, but also by cutting and pasting from the Internet and sharing of homework online like music files – educators have responded with their own efforts to crack down.

The education minister has said that secondary-school graduation diplomas awarded from this year on would be designed and prepared by his department and incorporate security features to make them forgery-proof. He added that the certificates would be free of charge and hence neither school heads nor school boards could receive payment for them.

Last year, the ombudsman for Andalusia received 150 complaints over the enrolment process, according to the 2008 report just published. This is why he favours harsher penalties for fraudulent applications as there are no clear-cut punitive measures that set an example. However, the province's education ministry maintains that punishment is not the best response, so no sanctions will be taken.

The public prosecutor for economic crime in Mar de Plata is investigating 96 officers suspected of using falsified secondary-education degrees in order to get promoted. He also stated that a preliminary report by the Buenos Aires ministry of education has confirmed that 250 such certificates presented by police officers are being checked and at least 96 are false.

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.

People in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda have been found buying fake degrees of all sorts from diploma mills and other bogus universities. Those universities have no physical existence and operate only through websites. Most diploma mills are operating from Britain or United States where academic standards are presumed to be very high. Recently, the Federal Bureau of Investigations compiled a list of over 10,000 persons who obtained fake degrees from diploma mills in USA. A significant number of them are from South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria. Currently, there are about 80 notorious diploma mills that operate from the United States and the UK.