An online cash-for-grades scheme is about to explode in California as yesterday the college at the center of the stink sent prosecutors the names of 74 students who may be charged with felony crimes. College administrators and police said students paid student employees about $600 per changed grade and as many as 400 grades were altered during the course of three years.
Police and administrators suspect a core group of student employees at the Diablo Valley College (DVC) concocted the scam to let them replace “F” grades with “A” grades by taking advantage of an unusually lax access security policy that let more than 100 people access college’s grade system network. Registrars from other schools generally say no more than five employees should have the ability to change grades and students should not be among them, according to an article in the Contra Costa Times, which broke the story earlier this year. “We believe it’s best to have full-time employees whose allegiance is to the job,” said Barmak Nassirian, a spokesman for the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers said in the Times article. Allowing student access “sounds a bit too lenient.” Reports say the number of employees with network access rights proliferated over a period of about three years and student workers took advantage of other oversights, including authorized network users who stepped away from their desks without first locking their machines, investigators say. Many of the suspects have already transferred to four-year universities, including the University of California at Berkeley and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and it’s unclear how the investigation will impact their enrollment, but we can guess.
