BEIJING — China’s Ministry of Education has released an announcement requiring universities to work harder to end academic misconduct in bachelor’s theses, including plagiarism, fabrication, falsification, ghostwriting, as well as buying and selling theses, the ministry said on Sept 4.

The announcement, in a bid to restore order to undergraduate education, asked for revised management systems to strengthen supervision over all steps in the thesis process including topic selection, proposal, and defense, as well as strict enforcement of plagiarism detection and spot checks on bachelor’s theses.

It also called for more challenging and better quality curriculum, adding that formative assessment performance should comprise a higher proportion of a student’s total score.

The current evaluation system applied on college teachers also needs to be revised, as required by the announcement, which said teaching quality should be a major consideration when reviewing teacher performance.