Scoring grades: How schools cheat to keep athletes in the game

NEW BRUNSWICK, New Jersey — At Rutgers University, it was a football coach working surreptitiously behind the scenes to boost the grade of an academically ineligible cornerback.

The University of North Carolina's athletic department was charged with steering athletes into "GPA booster" classes to keep them playing, in a cheating scheme that went on for 18 years.

And the Syracuse University basketball program was heavily penalized for a series of major compliance failures, including interference with an academic program to make sure star players stayed eligible to remain on the court.

Despite the threat of sanctions, suspensions and other threats by the National Collegiate Athletic Association, academic fraud similar to what was recently charged at Rutgers is no stranger to college athletic programs, with phony classes, no-show lectures and grade changing tactics still key parts of the playbook of athletic programs across the country, records show.

While the NCAA has not yet intervened at Rutgers, an analysis of NCAA enforcement actions shows 26 major infraction cases in just the past 10 years charging academic fraud, involving schools including UNC-Chapel Hill, the University of Georgia, Texas Southern University, Texas A&M and others. However, those cases are likely just the tip of the iceberg, said Andrew Zimbalist, a sports economist and professor at Smith College in Massachusetts, who called such cheating now a routine part of the game.

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