HUGE Student-Athlete Academic Scandal at UNC

Should you tell your potential employer on your resume if you took a number of paper classes to raise your GPA but never attended a class?

Any chance they will change the GPA retroactively of grads?

How about current students who took the paper courses?

You know it's ungood when comedy shows like Saturday Night Live and Alpha House make fun of you and your school.

http://www.statefansnation.com/2014/10/unc-becomes-literal-punchline-snl/

The New Yorker weighs in too:

U.N.C. Boosters Outraged That Some Athletes Took Real Classes

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/u-n-c-boosters-outraged-athletes-took-real-classes

CHAPEL HILL (The Borowitz Report) — An organization of University of North Carolina athletic boosters expressed shock and outrage today over a report that a few members of U.N.C. sports teams may have taken real classes, despite the widespread availability of fake ones.

The report, which alleges that several players may have fulfilled the curriculum requirements of actual classes, sent shock waves through the U.N.C. booster community.

“These players apparently attended classes, wrote papers, and took exams,” Hal Cowlington, the president of a prominent U.N.C. booster club, said. “The impact of these distractions on their athletic performance is, to put it mildly, incalculable.”

A spokesman for the university was quick to say that the cases of athletes taking real classes appeared to be “isolated incidents,” but promised that U.N.C. would press forward with a full investigation of the matter.

“As a university, it is our sacred duty to protect our athletes from education,” the university spokesman said. “We can—and we must—do better.”

I saw the SNL skit and even from an unbiased standpoint it was not funny!! They cant think of anything else better to write about, thats the sad part!!

This goes on at every school!! If you think that sham classes do not happen at every NCAA university, it does. You are completely naive to think that it is does not. Especially for the past 14 yrs with online classes. Why can some student-athletes take an online course in 4 hours before it is due and use others to look up the answers for them online!! You have academic advisors but man up and pick your own Major, seriously AFAM? Why would you choose that and what can you do with that besides be a teacher. UNC just gets singled out becuase if they checked at every major NCAA school for this type of scandal, the results will be astounding!! Always been a HEELS fan and always will be!! Better than players punching your wives on an elevator. Just saying there are still Ravens fans out there despite Ray Rice getting charged for Domestic Violence which trumps an athlete getting 2.2GPA compared to a 1.9 GPA to stay eligible.

That SNL blurb was pretty lame. The New Yorker satire was classic though.

Sounds like a man who has more to lose than just his integrity. Most people would do, or are doing the same thing right now. No one was hurt so get off your cross.

Not easy wrote:

It takes a man to stand up for what is right. You sir, are a coward.

Not unique wrote:

Strong words from a person on an internet blog, with no skin in the game here. This is how I support my family, I'm not going to tell my wife I've lost my job and no one will hire me now because I felt compelled to tell on an athlete who had someone else doing his homework.

Seriously dude. They listed the courses as lecture classes. They weren't just easy cake classes they were FAKE CLASSES. Man I know you must bleed tar heel but wow man this stinks to high heaven!Just man up and admit UNC screwed up really bad. Come on dude!!

Here's an Op-Ed that I wrote that was published in the Raleigh News and Observer today. I was an XC and T&F athlete at UNC from 2005-2009.

http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/10/27/4269517/a-chance-for-unc-ch-to-lead-the.html?sp=%2F99%2F108%2F

“I’m proud to be a Tar Heel.”

“The Carolina Way.”

“Tar Heel, born and bred.”

These were but some of the slogans I heard over and over during my four years as a student-athlete at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. These platitudes helped to build and reinforce the notion that we as UNC student-athletes held ourselves to a higher standard, did things the right way, with integrity, in all walks – on the playing field, in the classroom and in life. Win, lose or draw, at the end of the day we could hold our heads high, proud to represent a university with lofty academic standards to match our own athletic endeavors.

It was all a lie.

I’m still struggling to wrap my head around the massive scale of the athletic-academic scandal detailed in Kenneth Wainstein’s damning report. Yes, it’s true that many of these details have come out in bits and pieces over the past four years, yet such was my love for UNC I could not help but see the world through Carolina blue-colored glasses. No more. We now know the full extent of the truth, and that truth is shameful.

I said the student-athlete ideal was all a lie, but that perhaps goes too far. I know I never took any sham classes and earned every grade (good or bad) I received. What’s more, participating in collegiate athletics was instrumental in my growth toward becoming a mature adult, as I know it was for many of my teammates and friends. Through college sports we learned humility, teamwork, perseverance, leadership and the patience to marshal our efforts over months and years in order to achieve long-term goals. We enjoyed success, and we coped with failure.

Athletics did more to prepare me to succeed in life than anything I learned in the classroom, so it saddens me to hear people say that the system of NCAA athletics is incompatible with the educational mission of a university. I know firsthand this is not the case, but in light of recent events, who can blame them for saying so?

It is clear that the problem that gave rise to the entire UNC academic-athletic fiasco is that many athletes were admitted who were unable to do the academic work expected. The whole system of sham courses was created and maintained with the express purpose of maintaining the eligibility of athletes who otherwise would not have cut it academically. The administration at UNC has already rolled out a number of changes and programs to help ensure that athletes now honestly keep up academically, yet these changes are just window dressing to a status quo that is already broken.

Fundamental changes must be made. We should require that the average SAT score of incoming scholarship athletes on any given team fall above the 33rd percentile for SAT scores of all incoming freshmen at that school. This rule would go a long way toward ensuring that athletes are admitted to a school where they have a chance to succeed academically without resorting to the type of fraud seen over 18 years at UNC.

Ideally, this standard would be applied nationally as an NCAA regulation, but I know such a change would be slow to be adopted. Therefore, I call on UNC-CH Chancellor Carol Folt to adopt voluntarily this standard as a reflection of a meaningful commitment to ensure that such a shameful scandal never happens again. We as a university lost our way, and how we respond will shape our identity going forward.

Folt needs to seize this opportunity to have UNC lead the way in the national reform of collegiate athletics. Help me to be again proud to be a Tar Heel.

I have criticized UNC for the hypocrisy and for this system of apparent plausible deniability in place to cover poor their ethics. However, if this institution can produce graduates with your quality and class as reflected in your post they have been doing something right.Great post. It should have an audience wider than this message board.

It was an editorial in the newspaper. I'm not smart, but I think that is an audience wider than this message board.

[quote]Conundrum wrote:

Great post. It should have an audience wider than this message board.

toothpicks wrote:

Parts of this story came up before. I remember reading on here about the Rosa Parks plagiarized essay (or paragraph) that got a student an A-.

http://mashable.com/2014/03/28/rosa-parks-146-word-essay/

and you got that wrong - the paper was misrepresented by ESPN and other media

here is the real story:

"We should require that the average SAT score of incoming scholarship athletes on any given team fall above the 33rd percentile for SAT scores of all incoming freshmen at that school."

Not just the average or they will have a couple of fake team members with near 800s that don't attend practices or games but are "on the team somehow" and raise their averages.

Willingham has been disproved:

http://www.universityherald.com/articles/8789/20140412/unc-academic-scandal-outside-researchers-agree-with-school-finds-mary-willinghams-initial-study-flawed.htm

she was not qualified to do the kind of 'research' she claimed and the data did not support her claims.

she comes across more as a disgruntled anti-athletic shyster than a whistleblower

Pfffft! You want to cripple UNC athletics? Who in their right mind would do this? Read the Wainstein report. The incident was VERY isolated. It's the biased media that is blowing this WAY out of proportion.

The only thing worse than the people defending this blatant fraud at UNC are the NC State fans who think this is the second coming. Kind of hilarious.

I went to a good running University (In the Big East) and wouldn't be surprised if this was happening even on the XC/Track teams. We had some DUMB guys and girls somehow float through the academic semesters.

This is why I went to a real Ivy, not a self-proclaimed "Public" Ivy.

[quote]UNC Alum wrote:

Pfffft! You want to cripple UNC athletics? Who in their right mind would do this?

Read the Wainstein report. The incident was VERY isolated. It's the biased media that is blowing this WAY out of proportion.

I DID read the Wainstein report. The incident was NOT very isolated. The scope of Wainstein's report was limited to the AFAM department. However, if you read the supplemental e-mails, there are numerous departments and coaches involved. Both men's and women's basketball, men and women's swimming/diving, football, women's soccer were all participants. Naval sciences, philosophy, and exercise science departments were also guilty.

Since so many of the emails went "missing", who knows the entire number of coaches and academic departments were really in on the fraud.

You are kidding yourself if you think the media is blowing this out of proportion. If anything, having so many UNC journalism grads running North Carolina's media and the head of ESPN being a UNC grad, UNC has been given extreme leniency for years. IF the media had been doing there job, the fraud would have been exposed years ago.

You got a little dent right there in your tin foil hat, little feller.