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The thesis of the former German minister for family affairs was found to contain nearly 70 passages violating good academic practice. The Free University of Berlin required the minister to return the PhD certificate within one month after notification of the withdrawal of the degree, acquired through “deceit regarding independent academic achievement”.

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 Estonian Board of Education and Youth (Harno) is planning to test an exam monitoring platform, called Proctorio, and is currently collecting data on the needs of universities that have expressed interest in implementing the platform to stop cheating in exams. This US developed application allows for out-of-classroom exam monitoring and can be connected to older anti-cheating platforms.

As part of the government's crackdown on degree fraud, and to safeguard the international reputation of UK universities, 85 fake UK university websites have been shut down since 2015. Websites have also been found selling fake degree certificates from real universities: a BBC investigation in 2014 found a website selling the University of Kent for £500, which were described as for “novelty purposes, or as a replacement for lost diplomas”. Employers are encouraged to carefully vet the qualifications of any new employees as “The only way to stop these operators is to remove the demand”.

The number of suspected cheating cases at Oxford University rose from 26 in March to 55 in October 2019. The figures showed that 36 students had been investigated for plagiarism during assessments this year and 19 were suspected of collusion in open-book assessments. An additional six students received zero grade but were allowed to resubmit their piece of work.

A former Harvard coach accepted $1.5m in bribes in exchange for helping a businessperson get his two sons into the Ivy League school as fencers. They face charges with conspiracy to take bribes under federal programmes. The coach was fired in July 2019 for violating Harvard’s conflict-of-interest policy.