Bloomberg News On UNC Academic / Athletic Scandal

University-wide. I can't imagine the Einsteins in the athletic community exempted themselves.

 

... which, if that's the case, is garbage.

And the athletics department will do ANYTHING to avoid vacating the basketball titles. Keep in mind that this is the same bunch of people who are trying to sell us that the school won a national championship in 1924. The NCAA didn't award championships until 1939. (Hint: It's because when Duke won the title in 2010, it compiled as many as its rival down U.S. 15-501: four).

 

Just a point of clarity: UNC had five NCAA titles ('57, '82, '93, '05, '09) by the time Duke won its fourth in 2010. When Duke won its 2001 title is when the schools had the same number - three. The banner for the Helms championship has been up in the Smith Center since prior to 2001. I'm not sure exactly when it went up, but it was there when I first arrived as an undergraduate in the late '90s. And its not the only school to tout a Helms title. None of that refutes the point that nobody in Chapel Hill wants to acknowledge the '05 and '09 titles are tainted.

 

I was at UVA at the time, and Fart is correct. How Things Work was a well-known gut class, and there were plenty of athletes who took it. There was a football player from my high school who got kicked out for cheating. I can't recall if there were any star athletes who got tossed (he was not one), which probably means there weren't any.

The story of the scandal was that this class had one major paper that made up the majority of your grade, and papers were getting reused from year to year. Because it was such a big class, the professor hadn't noticed the reused papers in the past, but wound up using a program to search for common phrases. I may be making this up or misremembering, but I'm pretty sure they cut a deal (to cut down on the sheer volume of cases) where those who used stolen papers got kicked out, but those who let others use their papers did not. A few people even had their degrees revoked.

It was a big deal, obviously, and sparked a lot of debate over the single-sanction honor system (meaning if you get found guilty of an honor offense, you get kicked out).

I never took the class.

 

I'm not one to usually defend UNC, but my alma mater hangs two banners for Helms titles counts them among five national championships but recognizes just three NCAA championships. It was hardly a perfect way to pick a champion, but prior to the advent of the NCAA Tournament that's what there is. Recognizing the Helms title isn't much different than most of the football national championships that have been claimed down through the decades.

 

I went to one of those top 10 public univ and without a big time athletics dept. (although 2 high NFL picks when I was there)

Everyone knew you want to pump up your GPA? Take military science courses taught by ROTC guys, easiest courses imaginable, just did not count towards your degree; or take courses "designed for non majors". Many athletes in those classes

 

In the UNC scandal there was one such course. I think it was a Naval ROTC deal, taught by some guy posted there briefly. IIRC this guy taught just this one class just this one time, but conveniently something like 75% of the enrollment was football and basketball players. And, strangely enough, prior to then athletes had hardly ever taken this class, and after then the same was true. I'm sure it was just a coincidence. [/bluefont]

 

Practically every student at practically every university in America knows which classes are the easy ones that all the jocks take. We all knew what they were at my college, too. It's not a state secret.

 

There was another cheating scandal among first-year graduate students at UVa about 10 years ago.

 

I remember when that came out. I had not been surprised about the AFAM department because there were rumors when I was a student. There were also rumors about the Communications school - not the J-school but the separate Comm school.

But the Navy class was a shocker. I was friends with a number of Peace, War and Defense majors, and they all busted their tails. Those kids worked harder than most between ROTC and what seemed to be rigorous classes.