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Banishing academic dishonesty could help Mozambique nurture original thinkers who are economically efficient and socially suited to develop the country. But this will only be possible if administrators work with professors and students to build strong measures to combat widespread plagiarism, which is hampering the production of quality graduates.

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.

The academic spectrum across several Pakistani universities has become infected with the deadly plague of plagiarism. Academic integrity seems to have melted in the heat of churning out research papers to receive more grants, promotions and other benefits.

In south Korea, a case of plagiarism has shaken the academic world. 200 professors from 50 different universities have been accused of appropriating books by other authors. Their technique to avoid discovery? These unscrupulous academics simply changed the original covers of the publications and added their own names. According to the Korea Herald, some of the alleged culprits are well known assistant professors.

Britain’s universities are said to be in the midst of a “plagiarism epidemic” after an investigation by The Times newspaper revealed how almost 50,000 students were caught cheating in the last three years. The newspaper also found international students - from outside the European Union - to be the worst offenders, coming out as being more than four times as likely to cheat in exams and coursework, according to data obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

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.

Plagiarism at the higher education level has been an open secret, with many suspected plagiarists holding senior faculty positions in different universities across the country. But in a comical turn, the Higher Education Commission recently gave its best research paper award to a scholar who had been blacklisted by the regulatory body in 2008 for publishing a plagiarized paper.