From Inside Higher Education ...

An investigation of student athletes at Nicholls State University in Louisiana has revealed that students and university staff had engaged in "gross academic fraud" by fraudulently completing online courses to preserve the students' eligibility for sports. The university's registrar discovered the fraud after noticing that many student athletes were completing online courses from Brigham Young University (BYU), often with much higher grades than for classes they took at Nicholls. As it turned out, two coaches and an academic adviser were giving students answers for the courses and in some cases serving as proctors for the students' tests. The National Collegiate Athletic
Association (NCAA) confirmed the fraud and imposed penalties on the school's athletic programs, but the episode has raised a red flag about the potential for similar abuse of online programs. "There appeared generally not to be sufficient monitoring either by BYU or ... by Nicholls State," according to Josephine Potuto, member of the NCAA panel that conducted the investigation. A statement from the panel noted, "This case illustrates the ease with which individuals can manipulate and then breach security protocols for online correspondence courses."