At Ohio State University, a Chinese student took tests for Chinese classmates for cash last year, guaranteeing an A. At the University of California, Irvine, some international students used a lost-ID-card ruse to let impersonators take exams in place of others. At the University of Arizona, a professor told of Chinese students handing in multiple copies of the same incorrect test answers. A flood of foreign undergraduates on America's campuses is improving the financial health of universities. A Wall Street Journal analysis of data from more than a dozen large U.S. public universities found that in the 2014-15 school year, the schools recorded 5.1 reports of alleged cheating for every 100 international students. They recorded one such report per 100 domestic students.

"A student's birth name may be Margaret," Bilodeau said. "But today the student may prefer to be called John, Mark or Oliver. When in that situation, we have worked to implement a policy that allows students to be referred to on campus by their preferred name."

To measure how much students are learning, you need to know what students knew before they started a course. You can't just compare student grades in an adaptive-learning class with those in a traditional class because you might have stronger students in one of them. It was a particular problem to compare different semesters, because students who fail an introductory course in the fall often retake it in the spring, and the spring classes were filled with students who struggle more.

Minority students at the University of Kansas, frustrated by what they see as a lack of attention to issues they care about, are pushing for an independent governing body to represent their interests -- and have won the school's recognition and funding to start the long process that could allow them to do so. Students insist they're not trying to set up a wholly separate student government, with the thorny "but equal" questions that could spur. Details on how the arrangement would work haven't been decided, but advocates say they want a structure whose focus on social justice issues and multicultural students would complement the work of the traditional student government. The novel approach at Kansas is something experts see as the latest example of the anger and impatience many minority students feel after generations of exclusion from campus government. "It's important to raise the question of why would students of color want to go off and create a parallel student government," said Shaun Harper, executive director of the Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education at the University of Pennsylvania.

Although Siyonbola showed them her student ID about two minutes after they arrived, it took police more than 15 minutes to verify she was a student and allowed to be in the building. Peart said the encounter was drawn out because of a spelling mix-up, explaining, "The reason it took longer than usual for the student's identification card to be verified was because the name on her card was her preferred name (which we allow students to use) and did not exactly match her name in the university records."