Toronto’s Osgoode Hall Law School of York University will review admissions procedures, after The Toronto Star discovered a third-year student had used a bogus undergraduate degree to enter the program.
According to dean Patrick Monahan, the Canadian law school is “investigating additional verification measures that could be put in place to detect cases of fraud in the admission process.”
The measures come after Osgoode student Quami Frederick was revealed to have used a degree purchased from a diploma mill on the Internet to get accepted into the program in 2006.
More recently, Frederick submitted photocopies of transcripts in which her Osgoode Hall marks were inflated when she successfully applied for an articling job at Toronto’s Wildeboer Dellelce LLP.
Frederick, 28, is now facing an Osgoode Hall disciplinary hearing that she expects will result in her expulsion. The law firm has withdrawn its job offer.
Frederick was one of 290 students admitted to Osgoode in 2006 from a pool of more than 2,500 applicants. Her credentials included a purported BS in Business Administration degree from St. George’s University in Grenada in 2000.
A phone call to Grenada in the West Indies three years ago would have revealed that Frederick was never a student at St. George’s.
Frederick’s name is on a list of bogus-degree buyers compiled by US Homeland Security and Secret Service agents who took down a Washington State diploma mill in 2005.
St. Regis University, which ran for six years under dozens of bogus names, sold more than 10,000 degrees worldwide through the Internet.
Via The Toronto Star. Also here.