Academics in 'degrees for Cash' Inquiry

Eighteen people including students, university administrators, lecturers and professors were yesterday confined by judicial order to their homes in and around Rome as police continued an investigation into what they said was a huge degree-trading racket at Europe's biggest university.

Investigators said they had secretly recorded conversations worthy of a Mafia thriller, in which law students at La Sapienza university bought exam results using a code based on the names of flowers.

One was told: "A bunch of roses [according to the police, a first-class pass in criminal law] costs €3,500 [£2,500]."

Among those under house arrest was the head of the university's law faculty, Carlo Angelici.

The Italian universities' system of oral examination is notoriously liable to abuse. In this instance, said investigators, the fraud was masterminded by three university administrators who brokered deals between well-to-do undergraduates and junior lecturers who were willing to let them have the questions and answers in advance.

There is also evidence of straightforward forgery. Dawn raids in Rome and nearby towns on Thursday uncovered, among other things, a rubber stamp that appeared to have been used to falsify certificates.

Detectives posed as students to collect much of their evidence. One was quoted by La Stampa as saying: "We witnessed unbelievable scenes. On occasions, the system broke down, and the student ended up with the wrong junior lecturer.

"He or she would not say a word, not having studied anything. Then we would see the same student called back by the junior lecturer who was in on the conspiracy, answering the pre-arranged questions correctly, and coming out with top marks."

The rector of La Sapienza, Giuseppe D'Ascenzo, said he was saddened by the affair, and denied that any member of the teaching staff had been involved in exam rigging.

There is abundant evidence to suggest that higher education in Italy is riddled with corruption and favouritism. In the past 15 years, there have been exam-rigging scandals in the universities of Venice, Naples, Pescara and Messina.

La Sapienza, which had 144,000 undergraduates at the end of the last academic year, has been the subject of several police inquiries. The biggest involved some 700 students.

In a case six years ago, a law student, Marta Russo, was shot dead, apparently hit by a bullet fired from the university's law faculty building. Two junior lecturers were found guilty of her murder. Investigators said the two had been trying to prove a theory of the perfect, motiveless crime.

Those at the centre of the current scandal at La Sapienza were said to have approached either mature students who seemed to have ample resources or, more commonly, the children of rich parents.

The code allegedly evolved between the conspirators was distinctly poetic. Euros were tulips; the thorny rose was the notoriously difficult criminal law exam; and the low-maintenance geranium was the reputedly easier canon law paper.

Young Italians looking forward to a future in the ecclesiastical courts, wrangling over marital annulments and clerical disputes, allegedly needed to stump up a mere 1,000 tulips to secure the necessary diploma.