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According to the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, there are over 1,000 essay mills in operation in UK universities. The government announced that offering essay-writing services to students for a fee will become a criminal offence under plans to tackle cheating. Universities welcomed this decision and introduced codes of conduct with severe penalties for submitting work that is not a student's own.

The “proliferation” of essay mills over the past 5 years has led to an increase in the number of plagiarism cases. Last year, 338 cases were reported by universities in the North, with the majority of cases at Aberdeen University and Robert Gordon University. 1,000 essay mills companies are currently operating across the UK. Some are allegedly involved in exploiting graduates overseas where they are forced to work 12-hour shifts producing essays for as little as $1 an hour.

The Corruption Prevention and Combating Bureau (KNAB) detained Riga City Council deputy and University of Latvia deputy rector for accepting a bribe of 20 000 euros. KNAB has discovered information that proves the state official, while in the post of procurement committee’s deputy chairperson had accepted a bribe from businessmen, registering it as a donation to an association.

A row over whether or not the president of the Community of Madrid used her influence to obtain a masters degree has led to 30 university professors from across Spain signing a petition to denounce ongoing ‘academic corruption’ in Spanish educational institutions. The professors say the case against the Partido Popular (PP, a conservative party) president of Madrid’s Autonomous Community, is “a scandal without precedent” and argue that “the future of the public university and science in Spain will be determined by how this crisis is resolved”.

Plagiarism is increasing at the secondary school level, according to the numbers revealed by the Inter-academic Commission of Ile-de-France. Between 2013 and 2014, the number of cases of plagiarism and copying reported to the disciplinary commissions in Ile-de-France doubled, increasing from 24 to 47. They represented last year 25% of the 188 cases of fraud on exams reported to disciplinary commissions.