Fake certificates flourishing

The last few years have seen a rise in the use of fake degree certificates in higher education. This has emerged in a suggested referral from the Ministry of Education and Research (KD) regarding the Act relating to Universities and University Colleges. The statistics have been released by the Norwegian Agency for Quality Assurance in Education (NOKUT), which works with quality assurance in the educational sector. In connection to this, they have primarily been working with approving education from foreign institutions.

– We have experienced increased attention surrounding fake degree certificates internationally, and during the past few years we have used a lot more resources on exposing forged documents. This has led to us discovering more of these cases than we have done previously, says Ida Lønne, Head of Department at the section for foreign qualifications at NOKUT.

Lønne says that many web pages offer fake certificates of education, and even though several pages have been shut down, new pages keep showing up.

– We can tell that buying or manipulating certificates is getting easier via the Internet. You can find high-quality documents, and they can be produced quickly. You can manipulate both contents and names of institutions electronically, and this leads to it becoming more and more difficult to discover forgeries, she says.

Serious consequences

There are currently no statistics to tell us how many «diploma mills» there are. An example of such a diploma mill is the fictitious university «University of Norway», which claims to be situated in Bergen. According to the website, the university can offer Bachelor\'s degrees, Master\'s degrees and Ph.Ds cheaply.

When Universitas tried to get in touch with the institution via the telephone number on their website, you did not get through to a university, but rather a Wine Monopoly in Oslo.

Another infamous story is that of Sven Otto Littorin, the Swedish Minister for Employment, who in his CV claimed that he had studied at the fictional Fairfax University. Littorin, who represents Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt’s party The Conservatives, was disgraced when this was revealed. Despite the juicy revelation, the minister was not forced to resign, but was however forced to remove this fake education from his list of merits.

Per Anders Langerød, leader of The National Union of Students in Norway (NSU), is worried about the developments.

– If you are able to get a job without the required abilities, you will see cases in which criminals get into the justice system. There is no doubt that this will have serious consequences, he says.

Lack an overview

The suggested amendment entails that educational institutions and NOKUT can inform each other of cases involving fake documents. The proposed sanctions include confiscation of the fake documents, as well as the applicant not having approved education at any of the country’s institutions for a period of one year.

Lars Vasbotten, Head of Department at the department for University and University Colleges at KD, says that the goal of this point in the suggested amendment is to make the problem of forgeries in education more visible.

– This is about quality control in education, and our concern is that we do not currently have an overview of the scope of this problem. An amendment will also send a message that hopefully will have a preventative effect when it comes to faking certificates, he says.

Few disclosures

Vasbotten says that the suggested amendment encourages the institutions to use NOKUT and their competence to a greater extent when it comes to quality control of documents put forward during a possible approval of studies abroad.

– When there are set admission criteria, you do not want people to use fake certificates to get round that. With that kind of development, the general quality of education might suffer, he says.

The University of Oslo and The Norwegian School of Management in Oslo (BI) claim that they only find a few cases of fake degree certificates on a yearly basis. Marianne Schei, Director of the Department of student and Academic affairs at BI Oslo, stills sees the suggested amendment as an important move.

– That the suggested amendment involves NOKUT being tied even more closely to the educational institutions is a good thing in my opinion, and will lead to a strengthened search for more cases of fake certificates, she says.

Ann Kristin Egeli, temporary Director of Academic Affairs at the Norwegian School of Veterinary Science (NVH), does not think that fake certificates are an extensive problem at the school, and also says that they have only had one case of somebody using a fake degree certificate. This happened in 2007.

An insolvable problem

Even though all the institutions claimed to have thorough routines for revealing forgeries during admission, Lønne does not rule out the possibility that some applicants might get through the current routines of the country’s educational institutions.

– We are using a lot more resources on this than most institutions ever will, but I do not think that this is a problem that can be solved completely. As the focus on higher education has increased on the job market, you will always risk people using false documents to conform to the demands that are set, she says.

The deadline for the referral was the 17th of April, and the suggested amendment is expected to be processed during 2008.