Exam answers by SMS for €400, a thesis for €600: the Arad professors prosecuted for selling medical graduations to foreign students

Romania's public medical universities are among Europe's most established destinations for foreign students, with English- and French-language programmes that lead to EU-recognised degrees. The case prosecutors opened in July 2017 shows what happens when the people inside such a system decide to sell it.

According to phys.org (AFP) and Romania Insider, prosecutors searched two universities in the western city of Arad on 26 July 2017 and placed 36 people under investigation, eight of them professors. The allegation was that a network of professors, secretaries, IT staff and former students helped foreign students — mainly from North Africa and Italy, many of whom could not speak Romanian — pass and graduate for money. Prices were specific: up to €400 a head for answers sent by SMS during examinations and for inflated grades, and €500–600 for a thesis written by the professor, which secured the end-of-year diploma. Two computer technicians acted as intermediaries; €350,000 was seized from suspects' homes. Three students also faced prosecution. All those investigated are entitled to the presumption of innocence.

The 2025 sequel points the other way across a border: Romanian prosecutors conducted searches targeting twelve Moldovan doctors suspected of obtaining recognition in Romania for residency qualifications from Moldova's Nicolae Testemițanu University that, investigators believed, had not actually been completed — the doctors having worked full-time in Romania throughout the period when they were supposed to be physically present in clinics in Chișinău. Moldova's health minister denied the diplomas were fake, and the matter is contested.

Why this matters for a student choosing Romania — or any country: the fraud here did not come from an agent or a fake school. It came from inside real institutions, and its customers were students who wanted a degree without the ability to earn it. Two things follow. A programme that markets itself to students who cannot speak its language of instruction, and promises they will graduate anyway, is describing this case. And a degree obtained this way is exposed later, when a regulator in another country asks how a graduate who never learned the language passed the clinical years.

The honest route through Romania is not hidden: the universities' own international offices, the published entrance requirements, the language conditions for clinical training, and tuition paid to the university. The graduates who leave with something worth having are the ones who met those conditions rather than paying someone to pretend they had.