According to a story in the San Francisco Chronicle , in spring 2006, records for five students at the University Preparatory Charter Academy, in East Oakland are inconsistent with grades that show up on the students’ report cards and transcripts. These students, whose report cards show they received C’s, D’s, and F’s, have on their transcript glittering A’s and B’s.

Earlier this month, this year round school, fondly referred to as Uprep, was found guilty of using illegal copies of a 2005 exam to help the students prepare for a similar exam this year.

Clearly there is someone in the school who is trying to create a false image of academic excellence for Uprep.

“The whole system is designed around this idea that students’ grades are inflated to help the student,” said Bob Martel, a math teacher who was fired from Uprep in May after he alerted the state Department of Education about a separate effort to cheat on the 2007 state achievement test in the spring.

But how good is a system that gives students higher grades than they deserve to help them get in college, when if it is clear that they can’t handle high school level work, it’s inevitable that they will most likely do poorly in college as well. So ultimately, who benefits from this fraud? Definitely not the students. And personally, I wonder why a student who didn’t care much for high school would want to go to college, which in a sense is four more years of an even tougher academic struggle for that student. High school is like a foundation for college – if there is no storing foundation, the building will collapse.

And so whoever is assisting these five students by “improving” their grades, their only leading these students to collapse later on from an even greater fall than they would have to deal with right now.
—Maahum Chaudhry