(AllHipHop News) Rosa Parks did not get arrested for this. A tutor at the University of North Carolina spoke on athletes taking fake classes and having falsified grades in order to retain eligibility to play.
In an expose from ESPN, Mary Willingham spoke on the scam of “paper classes” which were classes labeled as “independent studies” and did not require athletes to attend the classes and were given grades based on one or a few papers. Willingham spoke on the literacy level of these athletes at the University of North Carolina, explaining why they were encouraged to take “paper classes”:
Athletes couldn’t write a paper. They couldn’t write a paragraph. They couldn’t write a sentence. Some of these students could read at maybe a second- or third-grade level. But for an adult that is considered illiterate
The African American department held a number of those “paper classes”. In one instance, a collegiate athlete was given an A- for a paper on Rosa Parks that was laden with grammatical and spelling errors, only ran 10 sentences/146 words and was incomplete. Deunta Williams, a former defensive back at UNC from 2007-2010 spoke on how players cavalierly spoke about “paper classes”:
Just that it was an easy paper class. It was a paper class, you know you can chill. You can get help writing it. [If] you wanted to get an easy B. If you had a reading level of third grade and you took a lot of these classes, you passed, you graduated. Couldn’t be too hard.
Back in May of 2012, UNC had an internal probe conducted and revealed that 54 classes in the African American Studies department were either “aberrant” or “irregularly” taught from summer 2007 to summer 2011. However, an independent probe by North Carolina Governor Jim Martin in 2012 revealed improprieties in the African American department dating back to Fall of 1997.
Check out the full interview and report at ESPN.com. Read the 10-sentence paper on Rosa Parks that got on student athlete an A- below:
