Education

A pair of mischievous Swedish schoolgirls ended up in court for bugging their teachers' staff room in a bid to get better grades, local media reported Tuesday.

In the tony town of New Canaan, students might someday get tracking tags along with their textbooks. No decisions have yet been made, but school officials plan to look into the possibility of adding radio frequency tags to student or staff ID cards, or place them on school property, like laptops, the New Canaan Advertiser reports.

Obviously you don't have to have a degree from Harvard in order to become a billionaire – but it certainly helps. According to Forbes' new ranking of universities with the highest number of billionaire alums, Harvard thrashes the competition with a record 62 billionaire grads to its credit – more than double the total of the #2 ranked school, Stanford. A whopping 62 Harvard grads are worth $1 billion or more this year, up from 54 last year. Yale clocks in at No. 5 on the list of the top 10 with 16 billionaire alums, while Princeton barely makes the cut at all, coming out tied for last place with Cornell with 9. Notable billionaire Harvard grads include New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Citadel founder Kenneth Griffin, Meg Whitman of eBay and David Rockefeller Sr. Worth noting: an Ivy League degree isn't necessarily better, and Forbes points out that on last year's Forbes 400 list, at least 41 billionaires did not have a college degree at all.

Hong Kong's decades-old Certificate of Education Examination ended its last round on Wednesday as its results were released to 122,387 students who had participated in the exam.

At Rhode Island College, a freshman copied and pasted from a Web site’s frequently asked questions page about homelessness — and did not think he needed to credit a source in his assignment because the page did not include author information.

An overwhelming majority of youngsters awaiting results out on Wednesday from the last Hong Kong Certificate of Education examination see fewer choices for further study under the new educational system.

Jessica King is a geologist at the University of Hong Kong. This year she taught a new course on scientific literacy to first-year students, encouraging them to take an informed and skeptical look at how data are used in media coverage of controversial topics like climate change.

Taking online college courses is, to many, like eating at McDonald's: convenient, fast and filling. You may not get filet mignon, but afterward you're just as full. Now the University of California wants to jump into online education for undergraduates, hoping to become the nation's first top-tier research institution to offer a bachelor's degree over the Internet comparable in quality to its prestigious campus program.

More than 100 students from local universities have headed for the mainland on a work internship program. The program is designed to give Hong Kong students an opportunity to familiarize themselves with the mainland working culture.

More than two-thirds of Texas schoolchildren flunked the state's physical fitness test this year, a troubling trend that doctors worry could get worse with the Legislature loosening the requirements for high school gym class.