All colleges and universities have routines for detecting plagiarism, that is, students have copied content from another text. But ghostwriting - where the text is unique but written by someone other than the one submitting it - is much more difficult to detect and coat.

SVT has asked 48 Swedish colleges, universities and other higher education providers if they found that student work was ghost-written, ie written by someone other than the student himself.

Of the 29 who responded to SVT's survey, 10 state that they made such discoveries. It is usually a case of occasional cases that sometimes go far back in time.

For example, the only case at Uppsala University comes from 2008.

Depreciated for lack of proof

The students who have been dropped by the schools' disciplinary committees have been punished with suspension, usually a few weeks or months. But in many cases, the cases have been written off because ghost writing has not been proven.

The University of Södertörn states that they had a single case, which was left without action because it was not possible to prove that the student did not write the paper himself.

At Mälardalen University there have been two cases, one of which ended with a fall and the other with a release.

From Jönköping University, Roger Sandberg, former secretary of the Disciplinary Board, writes that suspicions arose when "a teacher considered that the student's language skills had improved in a remarkable way in a short time", but that at the same time it was not possible to prove where the student was freed.

"Hard to detect"

But missing cases need not mean ghost writing. Several of the respondents point out that cheating is extremely difficult to detect and prove. Anders Tjernström, a lawyer at Örebro University, writes in his reply to SVT that no case has been found, but that it is also "very difficult to discover such work where one has not copied but let someone else write the whole work".

Even from, for example, the University of Skövde and the Swedish National Defense College, it is emphasized that the lack of cases need not be a guarantee that it does not exist.

"In the aftermath of what has come to fruition in the college exam, this is a very important issue to raise," writes college lawyer Jenny Hagesjö at Halmstad University, where a teacher recently discovered that his exam questions had been placed as an order on a web site.