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A Stanford sailing team leader was sentenced to two years probation for facilitating the admission of students to the university. He received $610,000 in exchange for recommendations for high school students he allegedly claimed to have recruited for his teams. In order to get their daughter admitted to Stanford, a Chinese family also paid $6.5 million to this official.

The T.M. Landry College Preparatory School in Louisiana is under federal investigation over its college admissions practices, transcripts with fake grades, non-existent school clubs and fictitious classes. Many students accused the founder of the school of abusing them and falsifying their transcripts. The court records reveal that he was accused of choking and dragging a student. In the investigation, the founder said that wall-sits and kneeling were used to motivate students and prepare them for the challenges of the real world.

Nigerian academics argue that the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, the sole agency permitted by law to conduct entrance examinations for all tertiary institutions in the country, needs to be decentralised and modernised if it is to stand any hope of dealing with the rampant corruption being uncovered within the body. JAMB has attracted a great deal of media attention over the past few weeks as a result of public hearings into several cases of corruption, particularly relating to the sale of official scratch cards, the biometric cards issued and used by JAMB for on-line registration of all examinations candidates.

As part of its drive to clamp down on excessive tutoring and elite private schools that prepare students for the best universities, the South Korean government has ordered almost a dozen universities to revamp their admissions tests to bring them more in line with the normal high school curriculum. The ministry of education has said it will look into punishing the universities who have violated the regulations, including a partial ban on recruiting students for the 2019 academic year. Meanwhile, the Korean Council for University Education found that more than 1,500 college admission essays submitted to universities last year were suspected of being plagiarised.

South Korea’s prestigious Ewha Womans University in Seoul – under the spotlight of investigations into a corruption scandal that led to the impeachment of the country’s former president faces renewed scrutiny. State prosecutors are seeking a seven-year jail term for the former president’s close friend for facilitating her daughter’s admission to the university and for having her high school academic grades altered. The daughter was last week extradited from Denmark to South Korea to face questioning related to her preferential admission as well as bribery allegations involving technology giant Samsung.

It has been argued, that the way to address the problem of unethical student recruitment agencies is to ban them. But are all education agents inherently bad? No. Are there serious issues and potential pitfalls? Absolutely. Although the use of education agents is fraught with potential problems, it is possible to develop ways to address legitimate concerns related to the holy trinity of accountability, integrity and transparency.

In Algeria the gendarmerie carried out ‘tens of arrests’ for fraud by officials, teachers and heads of some exam centres. Papers had been leaked via social networks, through more than 150 Facebook accounts, which had enabled the police to identify and arrest perpetrators. Meanwhile, 53 people have been arrested in a number of towns in Morocco for their alleged involvement in baccalauréat fraud. The arrests concerned 22 administrators of social network chat pages and sites for facilitating exam paper leaks and answers in return for money

The online disclosure of college admittance high-school exams has led to nationwide disruptions in Egypt and Algeria. Despite vows by authorities to make sure tests are secure, exam questions have been leaked prior to exam administration in both countries for several years. An October decree by President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi called for prison sentences for unauthorized disclosure of testing materials. But that decrees has failed to deter a cluster of Facebook groups that have leaked exam questions.

The Office of the Private Education Commission (Opec) has set up a working team to investigate private tutoring institutes which allegedly provided hi-tech devices to students to cheat in entrance exams after three students who took entrance exams for the university's College of Medicine, Faculty of Dental Medicine and Faculty of Pharmacy were found to have used video camera glasses and smartwatches to cheat during the exams. Opec will work closely and exchange information with Pak Klong Rangsit police who are investigating the case.