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Afghan education officials have found themselves embroiled in controversy after a record number of students failed in national university entry exams last week. Afghan students accuse the Higher Education Ministry, which determines university placement, of fraud and discrimination, insisting that as many as 60,000 of them failed purely on the basis of their ethnicity and mother language.

Turkey has suspended its recognition of Bulgarian university diplomas. The Turkish University Education Council made this decision on the grounds of high levels of academic forgery, fraud and exam cheating in Bulgaria. Bulgaria's Education Minister has admonished the Bulgarian media for provoking an international scandal, claiming that the problematic diplomas were forged by Turkish citizens.

The federal government wants to toughen the rules surrounding student visas in the hopes of cracking down on fraud and human smuggling — even though it's not clear just how big a problem this is. There is a proposal to weed out international students who arrive on a student visa as a means of gaining access to Canada's labour market and don't actually enrol in school. There are also concerns that some are ending up at sub-par institutions that ultimately hurt Canada's credibility on the international stage.

The former president of Chile's National Accreditation Commission (NCA) and two former university rectors have been jailed on charges of bribery and money laundering. They will spend at least six months in prison, which is how long the Public Prosecution Office has said it will take to investigate the charges.

The Chilean government's Lower House has rejected the findings of a report investigating allegations of educational profiteering in seven private universities. Student leaders and opposition politicians criticized this ruling, claiming that the government must not ignore illegal educational profiteering in Chile.

New laws to clamp down on academic cheating at China's universities may be implemented as the rampant problems of plagiarism, falsification, lying about credentials and research papers, and other misconduct continue unabated in higher education. However, some experts have said that government-led anti-corruption campaigns are common at times of public dissatisfaction against the authorities, so as to appease the public.

In an effort to control increasing cases of plagiarism and low quality research, the All India Council for Technical Education, AICTE, is to launch Project Factory – an online repository aimed at capturing abstracts of all postgraduate projects.

More than 600 degree programmes in 60 universities in Iran are now segregated by gender, in what is being seen as a major expansion of the government's efforts to separate male and female students. Iranian rights groups released the report of a study by Student News, which found that there has not only been an increase in gender separation but also in gender discrimination.

Bar-Ilan University was fined by the Council of Higher Education for admitting students without bachelor's degrees to graduate programs. The panel ruled that Bar-Ilan will be responsible for financing the undergraduate degrees of students who were enrolled in violation of the Council of Higher Education's guidelines.

Foreign universities offering degrees in Kenya without accreditation will be fined at least Sh10 million and their promoters sent to jail for three years under a new law meant to safeguard education standards. The Commission on University Education (CUE) will replace the Commission of Higher Education in overseeing university standards.