Fake Degrees? Blockchain Will Hash It Out For You
Blockchain gives every academic certificate a digital fingerprint — a ‘hash’ — helping universities anywhere in the world check in seconds whether the credentials submitted by an applicant are genuine or fake.
The Gist
The rise of fake degrees among Indian students seeking admission abroad highlights a serious integrity issue.
- Several students were caught using forged documents at Hyderabad airport, raising concerns.
- Such incidents tarnish India's reputation and complicate the application process for honest students.
- Edubuk's blockchain technology aims to ensure the authenticity of academic credentials, streamlining verification.
The use of fake degrees by some Indian students to get admission in foreign universities is a serious issue and undeniably also a national embarrassment.
In June this year, immigration officials at the Hyderabad airport uncovered a racket of students using fake degrees to secure admission in universities abroad.
In just two weeks in that month, the officials stopped four people at the Hyderabad airport after they found that the academic credentials they used to obtain student visas for the United States and the United Kingdom were forged.
Investigations further revealed that some certificates were arranged through dubious educational institutions and consultants.
These cases show a wider problem, where students eager to study abroad are sometimes misled by fake degree sellers into believing that they can slip through the system by changing marks or buying academic certificates.
When such cases become national headlines, it not only tarnishes India’s reputation but also causes trouble for meritorious students, as universities become more cautious and demanding while reviewing applications from Indian students.
Fixing The Problem
This is why a strong verification system is important. When a foreign university hesitates to take an applicant’s academic credentials at face value, it has to resort to verification methods that are expensive as well as time-consuming.
It often delays the student’s admission, sometimes by months. In some cases, students even lose their place entirely because of the delay. To those who have worked hard for their degrees, it appears unfair to be doubted because of the dubious actions of a few.
But a team in India is trying to fix this. The idea comes from Edubuk, a company that is helping Indian universities create certificates that cannot be faked.
Edubuk’s founder, Apoorva Bajaj, recently told The Core that the company uses blockchain technology to deal with this problem.
Bajaj said that a trusted system that protects the integrity of academic credentials is necessary in India because any digital document can be edited easily, and the unauthorised changes often go undetected.
How Edubuk Does It
When a university or an educational board issues a certificate, Edubuk converts the file into a unique digital string called a cryptographic hash.
The hash works like a digital fingerprint, and no two documents get the same one. The hash makes it easy to check whether a document matches the original stored on the blockchain.
During the verification, the hash of the submitted certificate is compared with the original hash stored on the blockchain.
Once a certificate is turned into a hash, you cannot make any changes to the document or reverse-engineer it to create the original document.
If you change even a dot in the certificate — let alone a number or a per cent — the hash will change, and the document will fail the verification test.
This will alert the university that the certificate provided by the applicant is fake.
The whole verification process takes less than a minute, and there is no need to call or email anyone or hire a verification agency.
Edubuk has already uploaded more than 25,000 certificates, and only a small number — about 1-2% — shows signs of tampering, Bajaj said.
Who Else Is Using Blockchain for Certificates?
India isn’t the only country trying out this idea. The University of Bahrain issues blockchain-secured diplomas, and the University of Nicosia in Cyprus was one of the first to anchor certificates to a public blockchain.
With students moving across borders more than ever before and companies hiring globally, the traditional system of verification cannot keep up.
A reliable and tamper-proof technology like blockchain gives them an easy and fast way to check whether a credential is real.
As more universities adopt this system, the world of academic verification will become quicker and much harder to cheat.
This series is brought to you in partnership with Algorand.
