The NCAA won’t penalize North Carolina for putting athletes in fake classes that sometimes never met at all.
How bad were the classes?
This “final paper” was given an A-minus:
The NCAA won't penalize UNC for putting athletes in classes that never met and often required only one final paper. This one got an A-minus. pic.twitter.com/Mh8SQ63ND5
— Bryan Armen Graham (@BryanAGraham) October 13, 2017
UPDATE: It turns out that the Tweet wasn’t entirely accurate. Here’s an update on said paper:
The story behind the essay, however, was more complicated than we thought. According to ESPN’s source, what the network’s cameras captured was not a paper from one of UNC’s fake classes. Nor was it necessarily a finished piece of work. It was most likely a draft of one piece of a take-home final for a legitimate introductory course. The student did not earn the A- for the paper specifically, but for the entire, completed class.
So instead of evidence of specific academic corruption, the image merely seems to be visual proof that UNC admitted athletes with grade-school-level writing skills and awarded them high marks.
In its feature, ESPN interviewed Mary Willingham, the UNC learning-specialist-turned-whistleblower who exposed the fake courses issue to the public. “I became aware of this paper class system, that students were taking classes that didn’t really exist,” Willingham told the cameras. “They were called independent studies at that time and they just had to write a paper.” Students, she noted, were not required to actually attend any classes.
