Mass-produced PhDs at heart of academic fraud ‘plague’

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A new study says the extraordinary scale of PhD fraud in Russia can be attributed to the reproduction of near-identical doctoral dissertations within universities, writes Jack Grove, reporter covering teaching and learning, quality assurance, student affairs and access to higher education for Times Higher Education.

Photo: Higher Education in Russia and Beyond (HERB)

With more than 3,500 falsified theses identified by the anti-plagiarism group Dissernet in the past two years, PhD forgery is now an “integral part of Russia’s statehood”, rather than a “fringe phenomenon”, according to the analysis published in Higher Education in Russia and Beyond, a quarterly newsletter published by the country’s National Research University Higher School of Economics.
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Additional resources

Beetlemania: a slew of similar PhD theses
on ground beetles was another 
potential case of doctoral fraud in Russia, 
Dissernet claims

Mass-produced PhDs lie at heart of Russia’s ‘plague’ of doctoral fraud by Jack Grove.
Academic ‘scallywags’ are gaining doctorates thanks to the circulation of dodgy theses within some universities, says the founder of plagiarism pressure group.

Some Observations on the Subject of Dissertation Fraud in Russia by Andrei Rostovtsev.

Source: University World News