This is gonna have the Tarholes all in an uproar!
"But a key detail about UNC's experience with academic fraud has gone largely unnoticed -- thanks to the university's assiduous PR management and a strangely desultory NCAA investigation. The system of academic fraud cooked up around 1990 was initially intended to benefit one team in particular: the men's basketball team.
The first UNC course offered as a favor to the basketball team, scheduled in 1988, was an independent study for two painfully weak students who hovered at or below the eligibility line. They received helpful B's, and out of that little experiment the UNC course scam was born. In fall 1992 one star of the basketball team ostensibly pursued an independent study with a faculty member who was on sabbatical at the time. (I know this because I shared a fellowship leave with that faculty member.) This had to have been one of the "shadow" courses offered by the administrative assistant who played such a central role in the fraud, a generous woman whose closest friend was the basketball team's academic counselor. She assigned A or B grades in the shadow courses, which required no attendance and little work. One player on the 1993 team took seven suspect courses with her help; four starters on that team majored in the department where she worked. UNC's 1993 championship run seems to have been aided and abetted by fraud."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jay-m-smith/college-basketball-an-unhealthy-addiction_b_9463152.html
"But a key detail about UNC's experience with academic fraud has gone largely unnoticed -- thanks to the university's assiduous PR management and a strangely desultory NCAA investigation. The system of academic fraud cooked up around 1990 was initially intended to benefit one team in particular: the men's basketball team.
The first UNC course offered as a favor to the basketball team, scheduled in 1988, was an independent study for two painfully weak students who hovered at or below the eligibility line. They received helpful B's, and out of that little experiment the UNC course scam was born. In fall 1992 one star of the basketball team ostensibly pursued an independent study with a faculty member who was on sabbatical at the time. (I know this because I shared a fellowship leave with that faculty member.) This had to have been one of the "shadow" courses offered by the administrative assistant who played such a central role in the fraud, a generous woman whose closest friend was the basketball team's academic counselor. She assigned A or B grades in the shadow courses, which required no attendance and little work. One player on the 1993 team took seven suspect courses with her help; four starters on that team majored in the department where she worked. UNC's 1993 championship run seems to have been aided and abetted by fraud."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jay-m-smith/college-basketball-an-unhealthy-addiction_b_9463152.html
