The Council of Europe and European Union joint project “Strengthening Integrity and Combating Corruption in Higher Education in Armenia” was launched in Yerevan on 27 May 2015. The Project objective is to support the development of prevention and integrity mechanisms for practicing professionals and to increase good governance in the field of higher education in Armenia.

A leading North Rhine-Westphalian politician has been caught up in a scandal over a botched-up seminar test. The Christian Democrat failed to observe correct procedures for test papers as a visiting lecturer at RWTH Aachen University.

Last year, Times Higher Education reported allegations thatan emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Leeds, often hailed as the world’s greatest living sociologist, had included several unacknowledged passages in his 2013 book Does the Richness of the Few Benefit Us All? that were near-exact quotations from Wikipedia and other web resources.

Since his election in 2004, the Georgian president has set about reforming the endemically corrupt university system through drastic, but effective, measures. Reforms targeted both the admissions process as well as the quality of higher education itself.

At the end of November, for the first time, 500 of INSA Toulouse most recent graduates received a secure card which attested to the authenticity of their engineering degree at their graduation ceremony. The aim of the operation is to fight against cheating and forgery. The cards given to the students are protected against forgery by a nanoparticle marker which is invisible to the naked eye.

Ukraine has little to offer international students. The quality of education offered is low, there is endless red tape and corruption is rife. Over the past quarter century, the quality of education offered has dropped dramatically due not only to a lack of state funding and a consequent brain drain, but primarily to rampant endemic corruption. Failed structural reforms and institutional incapacity in higher education have left Ukrainian youth without any hope of receiving world-class education and have had a negative impact on international students as well.

The German Defence Minister has denied claims she plagiarised parts of her doctoral thesis after a crowd-sourced plagiarism hunting website claimed to have found "elements of plagiarism" on 27 of the 62 pages of her 1990 dissertation.

Over the last few weeks, the various faculties of the University of Lyon have been doing awareness training with their students on the question of plagiarism. Presented as members of the animal kingdom – sheep, parrots or chameleons, the campaign distinguishes between different types of plagiarists: involuntary, negligent or serious.

Academic ‘scallywags’ are gaining doctorates thanks to the circulation of dodgy theses within some universities, says the founder of plagiarism pressure group. The extraordinary scale of PhD fraud in Russia can be attributed to the reproduction of near-identical doctoral dissertations within universities, with more than 3,500 falsified theses identified by the anti-plagiarism group Dissernet in the past two years.

Oxford University has been urged in an open letter to review its decision to accept £75m from Britain’s richest man to build the Blavatnik School of Government. The letter also urges the university to carry out urgent “transparency and procedural reforms” with regard to foreign donations.