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Report Shows Widespread Academic Fraud at North Carolina

A new report compiled by former DOJ (Department of Justice) official Kenneth Wainstein shows widespread academic fraud at the University of North Carolina over the span of two decades.

According to the report, the fraud involved thousands of students, half of which were athletes (via Deadspin.com).

It (the report) details the extent to which administrators Debby Crowder and Julius Nyang’oro flooded the Department of African and Afro-American Studies with so-called “paper classes” beginning in 1992.

While every college football and college basketball program have classes that aren’t necessarily up to snuff with the general studies of the university itself, it appears that the administrators at North Carolina took this a step further since 1992.

Here is some of Weinstein’s report.

These were classes that were taught on an independent study basis for students and student-athletes whom Crowder selected. Like traditional independent studies at Chapel Hill or any other campus, these classes entailed no class attendance and required only the submission of a single research paper. Unlike traditional independent studies, however, there was no faculty member involved in managing the course and overseeing the student’s research and writing process. In fact, the students never had a single interaction with a faculty member; their only interaction was with Crowder, the Student Services Manager who was not a member of the University faculty.

Crowder provided the students with no actual instruction, but she managed the whole course from beginning to end. She registered the selected students for the classes; she assigned them their paper topics; she received their completed papers at the end of the semester; she graded the papers; and she recorded the students’ final class grades on the grade rolls. When Crowder graded the papers, she did so generously – typically with As or high Bs – and largely without regard to the quality of the papers. The result was that thousands of Chapel Hill students received high grades, a large number of whom did not earn those high grades with high quality work.

The report goes on to indicate that Crowder was attempting to “help challenged students with watered-down academic requirements.”

It also indicates that basketball and football players were among a vast majority of those who took these “classes.”

Student-athletes accounted for a disproportionately high percentage of enrollments in the AFAM paper classes. Of the identifiable enrollments in the lecture paper classes, 47.4% were student-athletes, even though student-athletes make up just over 4% of the Chapel Hill undergraduate student body. Of those student-athlete enrollments, 50.9% were football players, 12.2% were men’s basketball players, 6.1% were women’s basketball players, and 30.6% were Olympic and other sport athletes.

In some cases, these classes gave student-athletes GPA boosts, which enabled them to stay above the threshold to take part in athletics while in school.

In the case of 329 students, the grade they received in a paper class provided the “GPA boost” that either kept or pushed their GPA above the 2.0 level for a semester. For 81 of those students, that GPA boost was the margin that gave them the 2.0 GPA that allowed them to graduate.

While it’s obvious that these types situations arise in universities all around the country, it appears that North Carolina’s fraud was more widespread than originally thought.

Here is the full report below.

Unc Final Report

Photo: CBS Sports

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