by Rachel Ogbu

About 60 students were forced to withdraw from classes in a cheating scandal at the Harvard University.

According to reports, the university implicated as many as 125 students in the scandal, which was detected when a teaching assistant realised that students may have shared answers in a take-home test for the final exam in a class on Congress.

On Friday, Michael D. Smith, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, sent out an email confirming the school’s academic integrity board had resolved all the cases in the cheating probe which had “somewhat more than half” of the cases involved students withdraw from the college for a period of time.

Some other students were given disciplinary probation and rest were not disciplined at all.

The Telegraph reports:

Some athletes were implicated, including two basketball team co-captains whom the school dropped from its team roster in the wake of the cheating investigation.

Past reports in The Harvard Crimson, a university newspaper, also linked football, baseball and hockey players to the scandal.

Mr Smith said in the email on Friday that the school wouldn’t discuss specific student cases. A school spokesman, citing student privacy, also would not say whether any athletes had withdrawn or say which teams might have been affected.

The dean said that a school committee was working on recommendations to strengthen a culture of academic honesty and promote ethics in scholarship.

“This is a time for communal reflection and action,” he wrote. “We are responsible for creating the community in which our students study and we all thrive as scholars.”

Thomas Stemberg, a Harvard graduate whose son is a student, on Friday criticised the university’s handling of the probe.

“If you challenge the entire faculty at the Harvard Business School and the Harvard Law School to come up with a process that took more time, cost more money, embarrassed more innocent students, and vindicated guilty faculty … that could not have outdone the process that took place,” he said.

Mr Stemberg, a supporter of Harvard’s basketball team, knows some of the students caught up in the scandal and his son knows others.

Harvard Undergraduate Council President Tara Raghuveer said Friday that the cheating investigation has been a hot topic on campus for months. She said some students started the new school year without knowing if they’d be allowed to finish it because of the lengthy period of time the probe took.