The University of North Carolina Academic Support Program for Student-Athletes was found culpable of creating easy, non-show classes that catered to student-athletes in an effort to give them better grades.

Kenneth Wainstein, a former top U.S. Justice Department official, said during a press conference Wednesday that academic counselors ushered as many as 3,100 students – approximately 1,500 of them student-athletes – into bogus classes that were geared toward keeping student-athletes eligible for play over the past 18 years (1993-2011)....

Wainstein said many academic and athletic officials knew about the scheme, which began with Deborah Crowder, a longtime manager for the Department of African and Afro-American Studies, and gave student-athletes inflated grades for what Wainstein termed “paper classes.”

Paper classes were essentially classes that were independent study, had no professor and just required a paper at the end of the term. According to Wainstein, Crowder never gave students a grade unless they actually submitted a paper, but she awarded “artificially high” grades to the papers submitted regardless of their content.