They don’t see it as something bad, Nasser Razek said. “For them, it’s the only way of survival. They say, ‘after one year in the English Language Institute, I can’t write an email without 20 or 25 mistakes. How can I write a research paper of 25 pages?'”
This is a story of how one university’s massive cheating scandal became a minor diplomatic incident.
In January of 2012, Montana Tech reported that 36 of its students were involved in a grade-changing scandal in which an unidentified former employee altered grades and removed courses from transcripts. As The Montana Standard, the local paper in Butte, reported at the time, the university identified 126 grade changes, 119 cases of courses being removed from transcripts and 19 cases in which courses were added. The paper also reported in its Jan. 7, 2012, article that the university intended to turn over the results of its investigation to local and state authorities for possible criminal prosecution.
That scandal came back to life this week when the Associated Press reported on Saudi Arabian embassy memos released by WikiLeaks suggesting that almost all of the students who were involved were Saudis studying in the U.S. on government scholarships and that their government attempted to shield them from potential criminal liability.
The AP reported on a memo describing a Jan. 4, 2012, meeting between top Montana Tech administrators and Saudi diplomats at the Saudi embassy in Washington in which Chancellor Donald Blackketter reportedly suggested that the students be flown out of the United States. The memo says that a Saudi diplomat subsequently “issued travel tickets to those students … to return to the kingdom so they don’t face jail or deportation by the American authorities.”
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