Year in Review: Flagler College grade changing affects about 200 students

In February, officials discovered that Marc Williar, vice president for enrollment management at Flagler College, had been changing scores of incoming freshmen. These included grade point averages, class ranks and standardized test scores.

About 200 students were misplaced in courses because of the data manipulation, according to the findings of a months-long investigation released in August.

Williar said he made the changes to boost the college's profile after noticing an incoming freshmen class in 2010 that had lower scores than previous years. He resigned and the college continued the investigation.

Williar "adamantly denied" manipulating any data prior to 2010. But the investigation also found falsification dated to 2004, when the academic profile of the 2004 fall class was altered.

Most of the alterations were made in the past few years, said college president William Abare Jr.

The erroneous information was reported to several agencies, including U.S. News & World Report, which ranked Flagler College tied for No. 8 among more than 70 colleges in the first tier of its Best Regional Colleges in the South category.

"I made a serious misadjustment and inflated the profile and said that it was something it wasn't," Williar said.

Some of the students failed after being placed into the inappropriate level of courses.

Students who failed were able to have their grades expunged and take another course. Students who were affected could also keep the grades or, if they passed, take the grade as a pass, which would not be factored into their GPA.

Abare said safeguards are now in place to make sure this does not happen again.

Among them are requirements to have more than one person looking at the data reported, a data security policy and having data uploaded directly instead of having it manually entered.

"This is just one unfortunate incident that obviously affects our reputation as an institution of higher education, and we're going to correct that," he said.