The Mid-West University on Monday sacked two of its lecturers for professional misconduct.

Sujan Pant was dismissed after he was found guilty of leaking exam questions and Bishwanath Yadav for granting marks to students without conducting tests, the university confirmed.

Pant, a lecturer at the university’s School of Law, had leaked the exam questions on at least two occasions. He first leaked the questions for Bachelor of Arts Bachelor of Legislative Law (BA LLB) exams three months ago. In the latest case, Pant was caught leaking the exam questions of two subjects in June, according to the university.

Yadav, director of the master's programme under the School of Engineering, meanwhile, was caught granting practical marks to students without testing them and by ignoring the subject teachers. He had provided full marks to 13 students of Master of Engineering Construction Management and Master of Structural Engineering.

“They were involved in criminal acts,” said Nanda Bahadur Singh, vice-chancellor at the university, at a virtual press conference on Tuesday. “We decided to sack them after our probe committee established that the allegations against them were true.”

This is not the first time the reputation of higher education institutions in Nepal has been besmirched by corrupt practices.

In July 2019, a senior official at the Office of the Controller of Examinations at the Tribhuvan University was found increasing the marks scored by a master’s student on several occasions.

Ram Bahadur Karmacharya, chief of the Confidential Department under the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, had taken bribes to inflate the scores of Surendra Koirala, a student at Patan Multiple Campus.

A probe by the Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority found that Karmacharya had inflated Surendra’s test scores in five subjects from 5 to 60 marks. The highest score manipulation was found in one of the subjects in economics in which Koirala’s original score of 9 was changed into 69.

Karmacharya’s action had helped Koirala earn three degrees.

Similarly, in June 2019, the Tribhuvan University Service Commission was found to have manipulated test scores to award jobs to the relatives of senior officials and professors. The test was later cancelled.

“This is an example of degrading professional ethics among our academics,” Binay Kusiyait, a professor at the Tribhuvan University, told the Post. “Academicians, who have the responsibility of shaping the future of hundreds of students, must not indulge in illegal activities. But that is not the case in our country.”

Also, officials of a university were found involved in professional malpractices while granting affiliations to private colleges.

A study by the University Grants Commission in 2017 found that the Lumbini Buddhist University had granted affiliations to colleges by breaching the law.

Though the university was established to promote Buddhist philosophy, literature and culture, it had granted affiliations to colleges of engineering and basic science without having any expertise on the subjects.

The study found that the university acted under the influence and pressure and that it was also involved in irregularities while granting affiliations.

“Irregularities and malpractices in universities cannot be controlled as long as there is politicisation,” Tanka Nath Sharma, a professor at Kathmandu University, told the Post.