Forget the ‘Scholar-Athlete’

Last year’s column “Dishonest Educators” (1/9/2013) reported on the largest school cheating scandal in U.S. history. In more than three-quarters of the 56 Atlanta schools investigated, teachers changed student answers on academic achievement tests. Cheating orders came directly from school administrators. The cheating was brazen. One teacher told a colleague, “I had to give your kids, or your students, the answers because they’re dumb as hell.” Atlanta’s not alone. Teacher cheating has been discovered in other cities, such as Philadelphia, Houston, New York, Detroit, Baltimore, Los Angeles and Washington.

Rampant academic cheating is not confined to primary and secondary schools. Cheating occurs in the nation’s colleges, as discovered during an investigation at the Chapel Hill campus of the University of North Carolina, the state’s flagship university. Over two decades, more than 3,100 students enrolled in and received credit for taking nonexistent phantom classes in the university’s department of African and African-American studies. Nearly 50 percent of the students taking the phantom classes were athletes on the university’s football and basketball teams.

Students officially enrolled in African and African-American studies lecture courses that never met. According to a university-commissioned report, Deborah Crowder, the department’s administrative assistant, required students to turn in a single paper. The papers were often largely plagiarized or padded with fluff. The students were given A’s or B’s after a cursory read. The classes were widely known on campus as “paper classes.” The department’s chairman, Julius Nyang’oro, was the professor of record for many of the fake classes. The university’s academic support program for student-athletes notified both Nyang’oro and Crowder of what grades students needed “to remain academically or athletically eligible.”

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