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Angola's higher education and science minister has denounced officials’ fraudulent malpractice in student university entrance processes. The former dean of the medical faculty and associate professor at Katyavala Bwila University, Benguela, said the use of fraud, cronyism, and nepotism for a student to gain a place at university was a “widespread evil” which all of society should fight against. The minister said it was “unacceptable that those students with the best results are not selected for university entrance because of the negative influences of a number of senior university managers”.

A diary seized from a Karimnagar lecturer, a co-accused in the case, revealed that the certificate racket is much murkier than the police initially thought. CCS additional DCP told TOI, “We have questioned the main accused, 41, from June 7 to 11. We analyzed the diary which revealed that the lecturer, in connivance with the staff of several universities in Mumbai, Kolkata, and Guntur, obtained fake certificates for the accused. At least 4,500 certificates from 60 universities across the country were obtained and sold. He had written the rates of each university certificate in the diary.

Amid a period of growth for the higher and further education sectors, with some institutions investing millions of pounds in new building projects and developments, officers want to highlight how organizations can be left vulnerable to the risk of money laundering, fraud, and cybercrime. Institutions also have a duty to ensure that workers in the supply chain are not being exploited as victims of human trafficking.

Apparently, degrees from Aberdeen University and Robert Gordon University can be obtained for as little as £200, complete with university emblems and gold seals. It has emerged that copies of RGU degrees even contained faked signatures. Other institutions being targeted include St Andrews University, Glasgow University, and Edinburgh University. The information has come to light after a Sunday newspaper claimed that one website sold over 3,000 fake qualifications from various education establishments to UK-based buyers between 2013 and 2014. These included degrees, doctorates, and PhDs.

A recent sex-for-marks scandal involving a senior academic and a postgraduate student has highlighted not only the prevalence of the problem, but the difficulty in addressing it in Nigerian universities. In an official response to the issue, the National President of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) said any academic staff member found guilty of sexual harassment, after undergoing due process, should be made to face the wrath of the law. He also stated that those found guilty would enter the union’s Book of Dishonour.

Thousands of female students are occupying facilities at Chilean universities up and down the country, demanding non-sexist education and an end to sexual harassment and abuse. The first of these protests was triggered several weeks ago at Universidad Austral de Chile (UACh) in Valdivia in southern Chile by the transfer to another post of a researcher at the Institute of Biochemistry and Microbiology, found guilty of gravely harassing a female administrator. Students are asking for him to be dismissed.

Kazakhstan’s anti-corruption strategies are showing early signs of progress, a top official at the country’s Agency for Civil Service Affairs and Fighting Corruption said. Among the cited projects was Sanaly Urpak (Conscious Generation), established in Almaty, which seeks to minimise corruption in the education system. The project has developed an optimal solution for curbing corruption at the secondary and higher education level, as well as disseminating the academic honesty principle. University academic integrity and cohesion ratings will be issued annually based on project estimates.

Members of a special team at the Education Department that had been investigating widespread abuses by for-profit colleges have been marginalized, reassigned or instructed to focus on other matters, according to current and former employees. The investigative team had been created in 2016 after the collapse of the for-profit Corinthian Colleges, which set off a wave of complaints from students about predatory activities at for-profit schools. The institutions had been accused of widespread fraud that involved misrepresenting enrolment benefits, job placement rates and program offerings, which could leave students with huge debts and no degrees.

The number of students caught cheating at the UK’s top universities has shot up by a third in three years, with experts warning that institutions are ignoring the problem. A senior teaching fellow at Imperial College London and one of the UK’s leading experts on essay cheating, said: “A growing number of young people also feel more pressure than ever before, often turning to cheating to help them get through their degrees. It’s also easier to access websites that offer paid-to-order essays”.

Tajikistan has been hit by a huge fake dissertation scandal that reaches all the way up to the highest echelons of government. Russian networking community Dissernet (in Russian) has revealed that more than 25 doctoral dissertations from Tajikistan defended between 2004 and 2015 contained significant elements of plagiarism. Included in the blacklist are high-ranking government figures such as the first deputy prime minister who is a close relative of the country’s longstanding president.