UNC-Chapel Hill officials and others looking into the academic fraud at the university might want to take notice of a comment posted on a course evaluation website that students use to pick classes.

In April 2010, an anonymous student wrote this regarding Julius Nyang'oro's AFRI 370 class:

"I am taking the course by submitting a paper with Prof. Nyang'oro and it is a bit daunting. It has to be between 20-25 pages. I wish I was able to take the actual course with him."

The details match up with the university's investigation covering the period of 2007 to 2011 that found 54 no-show classes mostly offered by Nyang'oro, the longtime department chairman forced into retirement last month. The classes had little or no instruction, and Nyang'oro told students to write a paper to hand in at the end of the semester.

AFRI 370, known as Policy Problems in African Studies, does not turn up on that list. But other university records show that Nyang'oro was listed as teaching it in the spring 2010 semester. It is described as a course with "(l)ectures, readings, and research projects on one problem each semester concerning policy formation by African leaders or on United States–Africa policy issues."

Mike Rihani, a co-founder of Koofers, said there's no way a student could back date a comment, so it looks like this might have been the first apparent clue of a problem. But there was no grade information associated with that particular class on Koofers' site, something that tends to happen, Rihani said, when only a handful of students take a class.

We found the comment because we have been looking at Koofers and a similar website, MyEdu.com, to see if we can find grade data for the 54 no-show classes. We found 17 such courses between the two sites, held in the semesters UNC-CH had reported, and in all but three we found no grades lower than a B-minus.

The other three classes listed nothing lower than a C-minus, and in percentages no greater than 14 percent. Thirteen classes showed the percentage of students receiving A-minus or better was 64 percent or higher.

There are caveats to this information because we don't know if the data on each course reflects one class section or more, and Koofers does not report how many students were in each course. But the data tends to support suspicions that those who enrolled in these classes -- and that's predominately athletes -- had gotten good grades for doing the assigned work.

UNC officials appear headed toward creating an outside panel to look into the academic fraud case that has now drawn significant national attention.

Former Gov. Jim Martin has apparently been asked to serve on the panel. When asked this morning, he didn't deny it. His response: "You are on your toes."

He said he expected an announcement about the panel later today.

The academic fraud involves at least 54 classes in which there was little or no instruction, and dozens of independent studies that showed little accountability. All were courses within the Department of African and Afro-American Studies, but university officials say the only two culpable people in the case are the former chairman, Julius Nyang'oro, who was forced to retire in July, and a former department manager, Deborah Crowder, who had retired in 2009.

The university's internal probe covered the period of 2007 to 2011, but new evidence suggests the fraud may have gone back to the late 1990s. A 2001 test transcript we found on UNC-CH's website and published in Saturday's paper -- because it shared many similarities with the no-show classes and independent studies -- appears to be that of former UNC football and basketball player Julius Peppers.

Rival N.C. State University fans dissected the web address for that test transcript to find a link to what appears to be the real one. UNC-CH officials have only said the transcript appears to be real, but they can't discuss it because of a federal privacy law for education records.

A former chemistry professor at Davidson College, Martin was governor for two terms from 1985 to 1993. He also served a term on the UNC Board of Governors.

The university has been under pressure from faculty and others to set up an outside independent investigation of the scandal. It is unclear exactly what duties this planned panel will have.

UNC-CH officials could not be reached.

In the wake of our reporting on the academic fraud scandal at UNC-Chapel Hill, reporter Dan Kane has attracted a bit of attention of his own.

More folks have noticed a web site, dirtydankane.com, that went up earlier this year after some of Dan's reporting about the Department of African and Afro-American Studies. The web site bigleadsports Tuesday morning raised the question of whether Julius Peppers' agent had set up a web site to vent his anger about Dan.

In a word, yes. But the site set up by Carl Carey Jr. goes back a few months, and it isn't related to Dan's work Monday and Tuesday about the UNC transcript bearing Peppers' name. His professional relationship with Peppers, which goes back to when he was Peppers' academic adviser at UNC, is coincidental to this story.

In the wake of our reporting on the academic fraud scandal at UNC-Chapel Hill, reporter Dan Kane has attracted a bit of attention of his own.

More folks have noticed a web site, dirtydankane.com, that went up earlier this year after some of Dan's reporting about the Department of African and Afro-American Studies. The web site bigleadsports Tuesday morning raised the question of whether Julius Peppers' agent had set up a web site to vent his anger about Dan.

In a word, yes. But the site set up by Carl Carey Jr. goes back a few months, and it isn't related to Dan's work Monday and Tuesday about the UNC transcript bearing Peppers' name. His professional relationship with Peppers, which goes back to when he was Peppers' academic adviser at UNC, is coincidental to this story.

A 2001 academic transcript published by The News & Observer two days ago that UNC-Chapel Hill officials insisted was fake may be the real thing, and it may belong to one of the most popular athletes in the university's history — Julius Peppers.

If both transcripts are authentic, the university could be in far deeper trouble with regard to an ongoing academic scandal that is still coming into view. At issue is whether individuals in the university set up a series of bogus, no-show classes that were predominantly taken by athletes possibly with the intent of helping them maintain their eligibility to play sports.

Should Peppers be entangled in the practice it would suggest that trumped-up classes for athletes may have been going on much longer than university officials have confirmed. It may also draw the basketball program deeper into a situation that initially centered on football palyers.

Peppers was a star football player at UNC from 1999 to 2001, and also saw significant playing time as a member of the basketball team for two seasons. He is now an All-Pro defensive standout for the Chicago Bears.

A poster to the PackPride bulletin board for rival N.C. State University fans put up a link late Sunday night that shows what appears to be a partial transcript of Peppers' on UNC-CH's website. The web address for the transcript-- https://www.unc/edu/sis/fsguest/fssumalpha.html -- is very similar to that of the test transcript -- www.unc.edu/sis/fsguest/fsacadpro.html#top.

A review of the purported Peppers transcript and the test transcript is a match for 34 of 36 classes. The two classes that are not similar show the same class and semester, but differ on the grade. The Peppers transcript shows an incomplete for a Black Nationalism class, while the test transcript shows the student receiving a B-plus. The test transcript also shows an A for an African American Seminar class that the Peppers transcript only shows he was registered to take it.

If the information is true, the discovery could cause huge problems for UNC-Chapel Hill. For one, the N&O reported the test transcript because it shares several characteristics with a major academic fraud scandal at the university, one that university officials have been reluctant to determine just how far back it goes. The African-American Seminar class, known as AFAM 070 back then and as AFAM 396 today, appears four times as a no-show class in an internal review that found 54 such classes during the period of 2007 to 2011.

The classes were all in the Department of African and Afro-American Studies. University officials say the only two people they believe to be culpable in the no-show classes are the former chairman, Julius Nyang'oro and former department manager Deborah Crowder.

The transcripts show grades of B or better on two other classes that popped up as suspect classes, and three independent studies in which grades of B or better were given. The independent studies are also suspect because university officials could not verify that anyone taught or supervised the students who took them.

Without those grades, Peppers might have not been eligible to play either sport.

Pack fans on the bulletin board also noticed another confirming detail: A 2003 ESPN feature story on Peppers in which his agent, Carl Carey, a former academic counselor to Peppers at UNC-CH, is described as saving Peppers from receiving a failing grade in his first semester. According to the article, Carey convinced the professor to give Peppers a re-test in an Elements of Drama class. The transcripts show a D for that class and for that semester.

The transcripts could also spell trouble for UNC-CH because federal law requires universities to keep academic records private. The 37-year-old Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act can potentially force an academic institution that releases such records to lose federal funding.

University officials could not be reached early Monday morning. Over the previous several weeks, UNC officials had repeatedly said the test transcript was just that, a mock up put together to test a university computer program that helps a student learn what other courses are needed to obtain a degree. But they refused to check academic records to back up their claims.

Our story last week on a special faculty report that drew more attention to the connection between UNC-Chapel Hill athletics and what appears to be the worst case of academic fraud in recent memory cited an issue regarding the process of admitting athletes with subpar academic records.

The issue, as the report said, appeared to be the fact that Admissions Director Stephen Farmer had yet to reject a recommendation by a special advisory committee that reviews such athletes for potential admission.

"It appears that Admissions can override decisions of the subcommittee, though a recommendation by the subcommittee has never been overruled since Farmer has been director. What criteria or influences would be used in such cases?" the report said.

Jan Boxill, chairwoman of the Faculty Senate Council at UNC-CH, later contacted us and said that issue is a minor one, because the special advisory committee is made up of faculty members who are concerned about academics. The issue, she and authors of the report said, pales in comparison to the good work Farmer has done to ensure that athletes who have little chance of surviving the academic load at the university do not get admitted.

The report points out such efforts: "According to Stephen Farmer, his office and the Athletics Department have increased efforts to discourage teams from presenting candidates that represent exceptionally high risks in terms of their ability to succeed academically at UNC. There is evidence that these efforts are working. In addition his office is accumulating data on the academic performance of admitted students so that looking forward, they will have an approved basis for assessing and managing risk."

The first clue of no-show classes at UNC-Chapel Hill came when rival N.C. State fans in early July 2011 found plagiarism in a Swahili paper by a former football player. The paper listed Julius Nyang'oro as the professor.

We thought it was newsworthy, and sought to find Nyang'oro for a story we published on the Swahili paper on July 17. We contacted his office and the department, and ultimately, we got this emailed comment from Kim Weaver Spurr, who is a spokeswoman for the College of Arts and Sciences:

"He is traveling in Africa right now. His unc email account is the best way to reach him while he is traveling."

The date of the email is July 14.

Fast forward to May and June of this year. UNC officials announce academic fraud in 54 classes, and say they can't verify that dozens of other independent studies were conducted with academic rigor. One of those no-show classes was AFAM 280, which Nyang'oro sought to place on the academic calendar two days before the 2011 summer session began. It was almost immediately filled with 18 football players and a former player.

According to UNC-CH's academic calendar, that session was supposed to have been held from June 16 through July 19, last year, with exams scheduled July 21-22.

The upshot is if Spurr's email is correct -- and according to an earlier email, it was information she had double checked -- that means Nyang'oro was in Africa for at least some chunk of the summer session in which he was supposed to be teaching a class.

These sessions, by the way, compress a typical three-and-a-half-month semester into little more than a month. So not being around for even a small part of it creates a larger problem.

We pointed out Spurr's email and the summer class schedule to UNC officials two days ago. We have also previously asked whether Nyang'oro was in Africa at the time of this class. When we get clarification from UNC officials -- or from law enforcement officials who are investigating -- we will let you know.

The Daily Tar Heel has a scoop today on the UNC-Chapel Hill academic fraud case  -- the first published interview with a student who took one of the no-show classes.

It turns out one of the student paper's staffers had taken AFAM 428, Bioethics in Afro-American Studies -- in the summer of 2009. The staffer, Nate Harrison, a nonathlete, tells the DTH that a friend characterized it as an easy class and a grade-point-average booster. Harrison also said the class had been described to him as an independent study.

Harrison told the DTH the class never met, and at the end of the session, he emailed professor Julius Nyang'oro a 20-page paper. Nyang'oro was the longtime chairman of the African and Afro-American Studies department until he stepped down as the scandal began to surface. He has since been forced into retirement.

"I never once saw Nyang'oro," Harrison told the DTH.

A university review found 54 classes within the African and Afro-American Studies department over a four-year period that had little or no instruction. Nyang'oro either taught or graded at least 45 of them. The State Bureau of Investigation is now conducting a criminal probe.

As our Sunday story reported, we now have the data from UNC-Chapel Hill regarding how many former athletes were among the students enrolled in the 54 suspect classes in the academic fraud case. The former athletes bring the total percentage of athlete enrollments in the classes to 64 percent, or nearly two of every three seats.

You can find the data at the end of this post.

There is one element missing in this data that the university had provided in the past and that's a breakdown of how many football and men's basketball players are among the former athletes. University officials said they could not make that information public because the numbers may be small enough -- say, one former basketball player in a particular class -- that it might identify that person.

The university is citing a federal law known as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which often is described as FERPA, for denying the information. You can read about FERPA here.

One of the more interesting findings in our story is that athletes, including former athletes, on average took more suspect classes than nonathletes. The ratio was roughly 2 classes per athlete, and one per non-athlete.

After seeing that, I took another look at former UNC-CH football player Marvin Austin's partial transcript. We had reported the B-plus he received in one suspect class, but the transcript shows he was also signed up for another: AFRI 520 -- Southern Africa, in the first summer semester of 2009. The transcript does not show a grade, possibly because he had not taken the class yet.

That class had six enrollments. Of those, five were football players, the other a nonathlete.

Documents:

UNC Chancellor Holden Thorp (right) recently declined to answer questions about how Julius Nyang'oro, the former chairman of UNC's African and Afro-American Studies department, explained suspect practices in courses he taught. PHOTO: N&O file.

CHAPEL HILL — In case you missed it in print yesterday, The News & Observer’s Dan Kane had another enlightening story about the troubled African and Afro-American Studies Department at North Carolina, and how suspect courses in the department appear to have been part of a scheme to keep athletes eligible.