Federal authorities have shut down a ring of sham test-takers, and arrested the ringleader, in a scam that allegedly allowed dozens of students from six Middle Eastern countries to obtain student visas to come to the United States even though they lacked the English-language skills to get the visas and could not handle the college work when they arrived. According to the Associated Press, the leader of the scam lacked a college degree himself but collected tens of thousands of dollars in fees to take tests, write papers, and pass courses at 10 public colleges in California over a seven-year period. A host of fake ID's helped the scheme work. The students now face criminal charges and deportation.

The Internal Revenue Service this week agreed that medical residents should be exempt from Social Security and Medicare taxes for services they performed before April 1, 2005, when new IRS regulations took effect. Within the next 90 days, the agency says, it will begin contacting hospitals, universities, and medical residents who filed claims for refunds. Medical schools and residents have been battling the IRS in court for years over the payroll taxes, known as FICA taxes, that have been levied on the annual stipends paid to doctors in training. The IRS's announcement follows a string of court decisions that have rejected the government's claim that medical residents are employees, not students who qualify for exemption from such taxes. The Association of American Medical Colleges issued a statement today commending the decision and vowing to continue fighting the revised regulations...

Grade inflation has resulted in an increase of 0.1 in grade-point averages per decade, according to an article published today in Teachers College Record (payment required). The article -- by Stuart Rojstaczer, a retired professor of geology, environmental science, and civil engineering at Duke University, and Christopher Healy, an associate professor of computer science at Furman University -- draws on historical and recent data for four-year colleges and universities. Faculty members grade more harshly, on average, at public commuter colleges and engineering schools than at other four-year institutions, the article says, suggesting that grade inflation may explain why private-college graduates are disproportionately represented at top professional schools and at doctoral programs in science and engineering. Mr. Rojstaczer is a longtime scholar, commentator, and critic of grade...

Two students at the University of Missouri at Columbia were arrested Tuesday night and accused of leaving cotton balls in front of the campus's Black Culture Center last week, an act that was widely viewed as an attack against black students by creating a visual reminder of African-American slaves' work picking cotton. According to the Columbia Missourian, a local newspaper, the two students, who are members of the university's Navy ROTC program, have been suspended pending a university investigation. The students have been charged with tampering in the second degree, a felony, and committing a hate crime, which heightens penalties.

An anonymous student at the University of California at San Diego has admitted that she left a noose dangling in the campus's Geisel Library last week, a decision that she now says she regrets but that she insists was not intended to send a racist reminder of lynching to a campus that has been seething in racial fears and resentments since an off-campus party two weeks ago mocked Black History Month. In a letter published anonymously in The Guardian, the university's campus newspaper, the student said she and friends had found a piece of rope, played with it, and then tied it into a noose. Later she ended up leaving it behind in the library, "a mindless act and stupid mistake." She said she had confessed to the police after learning that her action had been interpreted as a racist attack. "As a minority student who sympathizes with the students that have been affected by the recent...

Five higher-education experts sent a letter today to Education Secretary Arne Duncan, saying that one way to achieve the Obama administration's goal of increasing the number of college graduates is to crack down on colleges that use restrictive policies on transferring academic credits from one institution to another. According to the letter, those policies could help explain why students, 60 percent of whom end up attending more than one college, fail to graduate. "A credible study of the costs of restrictive transfer policies" -- called for in the 1998 Higher Education Act -- "remains badly needed," says the letter, which was signed by Kevin Carey of Education Sector, Frederick M. Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, Anne D. Neal of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, Mark Schneider of the American Institutes for Research, and Richard Vedder of the Center for College...

The discovery of a noose hanging in a library at the University of California at San Diego has students planning a protest over the third racially offensive incident at the university in the last two weeks, according to The San Diego Union Tribune. More details about the incident can be found at UC Regent Live, a blog. The noose was discovered a day after a student walkout interrupted a teach-in on race at the university, an event held in response to a party that mocked Black History Month and a racial slur uttered by a student satirical group on the campus's television channel.

Update (4:29 p.m., U.S. Eastern time): The university system's president, Marc G. Yudof, issued a statement today expressing outrage at the noose, calling it "a despicable expression of racial hatred," and vowing that "appalling acts of this sort cannot go unpunished." The statement said a student had come...

In addition to presenting the 2009 National Medals of Arts on Thursday at the White House, President Obama honored the recipients of the 2009 National Humanities Medals. They included three academic scholars: Annette Gordon-Reed, a law professor at New York Law School and history professor at Rutgers University who won a Pulitzer Prize for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family; David Levering Lewis, a history professor at New York University who won Pulitzer Prizes for both volumes of his biography of W.E.B. Du Bois; and William H. McNeill, a retired historian at the University of Chicago known for a series of seminal thematic works in worldwide history, notably The Rise of the West, Plagues and Peoples, and The Pursuit of Power. Also honored were Robert A. Caro, the acclaimed biographer of Lyndon B. Johnson; Philippe de Montebello, the former director of the Metropolitan...

Harvard University, continuing an effort to both serve the public good and commercialize research, announced today that it had granted exclusive rights to medical-diagnostic tools suitable for use in the developing world to Diagnostics for All Inc., a nonprofit organization. According to Jeffrey Krasner, a spokesman for Diagnostics for All, the key device is a postage-stamp-size scrap of paper that AIDS and HIV patients can use to determine if they are suffering liver toxicity, a common side effect of drugs taken to treat the disease. The device, which was developed in the lab of George Whitesides, a well-known Harvard chemist, will enable the patients to modify their drug regimen accordingly. Harvard was one of 11 universities that issued guidelines in 2007 to harness academic inventions to the public interest.

A state audit released this week takes a skeptical view of the sale of a 34-acre piece of land to St. Mary's College of Maryland by a real-estate developer who is a member of its Board of Trustees. According to The Baltimore Sun, the audit suggests that the $1.625-million purchase -- which consisted of an $800,000 payment and an $825,000 donation from the trustee, Michael O'Brien -- was based on an inflated appraisal of the property's value, a move that would have given the seller an excessive tax break for his gift. The college vehemently disputed the audit's findings, noting that the deal had been negotiated by the state attorney general's office and had been vetted by a state ethics commission. The college also said the sale price had been determined by two independent appraisals.