MORGANTOWN, W.Va. (AP) — Between May 1997 and August 2008, West Virginia University’s flawed record-keeping practices led to the awarding of 288 undergraduate and graduate degrees when students were apparently short on credit hours or had other discrepancies, a report released Monday revealed.

That’s a fraction of a percentage of the nearly 37,000 degrees issued during that decade, but Interim President Peter Magrath vowed WVU will follow a consulting team’s 29 recommendations to ensure it never happens again.

“Whether the deficiencies involve one or six or 10 hours, it’s intolerable,” he said. “The issue is absolute precision, accuracy and quality assurance.”

Among the steps the university is already taking is the hiring of a registrar who will be the official keeper of all academic records, ensure that all degrees are properly awarded and certified, and work with colleges to make sure everyone is using the same computerized record system.

Too often, a consultant found, WVU relies on paper-based systems in individual schools, where records can be incomplete and accountability for changing them nonexistent.

WVU will also work with the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers to take a closer look at the 261 undergraduate degrees, Magrath said. However, none of the questionable degrees will be rescinded.

“The report does not say they were improperly awarded, but that the record keeping was not in keeping with best practices,” he said, meaning some students may actually have the hours they need, but the hours were not properly recorded.

The review was prompted by revelations that WVU improperly awarded a retroactive master’s degree to Heather Bresch, the daughter of Gov. Joe Manchin, in October 2007.

Jonathan Cumming, vice president for graduate education, said deficiencies reflect recurring errors with how or whether transfer credits were recorded, whether course substitutions were sufficient to meet the credit-hour requirement, and how experiential credit was calculated.

Faculty Senate Chairwoman Virginia Kleist said she expects her colleagues to recommend creation of a faculty committee to work with AACRAO and the administration in the review of the undergraduate degrees.

“If the discrepancy is that they don’t have all their records in one location, that’s one thing,” she said. “That’s not good, but they graduated accurately. If, however, they graduated short even one credit, we on the faculty are very firm about what our requirements are and how well we educate our students before they graduate. So, from our perspective, we would tolerate no discrepancies.”

Twenty-seven of the 288 degrees were in the executive master’s of business administration program, where an improperly awarded degree forced President Mike Garrison to resign last year. Those, too, will stand, Magrath said.

After questions were raised about Bresch’s eMBA degree, some WVU administrators added grades and courses to her transcript, retroactively awarding a 1998 degree that investigators later concluded she did not earn.

Bresch is an executive with Pennsylvania-based Mylan Inc. and her boss, Mylan chairman Milan Puskar, is a longtime Manchin benefactor who also donated $20 million to WVU.

Though investigators later concluded that neither Garrison nor Bresch did anything wrong, they issued a report saying there was “palpable pressure” from the administration to accommodate Bresch. In the aftermath, several university officials were demoted, and Garrison — Bresch’s longtime friend — was pressured into stepping down.

Bresch, however, has repeatedly insisted she earned her degree fairly, substituting work experience credit for course work in her final year.

Though her case was the trigger for the AACRAO review, her degree was not one of the 27 cited in the report.

Magrath and Cumming said the review focused only on degrees that had actually been awarded. Though Bresch believed she had earned a degree, they said, the university never issued one.

Wayne Sigler, director of admissions at University of Minnesota and a volunteer on the AACRAO team, said its review was “not intended to be a reinvestigation” of the Bresch matter. Nor would Sigler comment when asked how WVU’s record-keeping practices compare with other universities.

“We believe these are well-intentioned people who are careful in their work,” Sigler said. “We’re seeing fine, dedicated, honorable folks working with a flawed system.”

Among the deficiencies the team found were the lack of a uniform policy for how long faculty should retain grades and student work, how grades can be modified, and how to hold people accountable for entering grades into the official computer system, called Banner. While teaching assistants and administrative staff can enter grades using a faculty member’s ID and password, Sigler said, that common practice makes it impossible to tell who entered the grade.

Nor do all academic units at WVU rely exclusively on the Banner system as they should, he said.

All the recommendations are designed to build accountability, transparency and integrity into the process, Sigler said.

Others include: giving deans final authority in awarding a degree; developing a standard approach for assessing and crediting experiential learning and nontraditional work; and requiring the registrar to retain student grade rosters forever.

 

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