Intrigue continues to build as new details emerge in the cheating scandal at Harvard. One student who’s currently being investigated reports that Harvard is looking for scapegoats.

Alex Halperin of Salon has a report.

It’s a new school year in Cambridge, Mass. Sculls skip across the choppy Charles, coy freshmen size each other up, pretending they belong, and scores of Harvard students and recent graduates are implicated in an academic scandal on a scale that dean of undergraduate education Jay Harris called “unprecedented in anyone’s living memory.”

Almost half of the 279 students who took assistant professor Matthew Platt’s Introduction to Congress class in the spring are under investigation for cheating. According to a letter to students from Harris, the charges are “academic dishonesty, ranging from inappropriate collaboration to outright plagiarism, on a take-home final exam.” (The university has not acknowledged the specific class.)

One senior who’s under investigation, and who spoke to Salon only on condition of anonymity, said that the scandal was a crackdown on a course that has a reputation for being easy. The course had a “culture” in which collaboration was “fostered, encouraged, expected.” Students were encouraged to treat exams like “problem sets,” which the student understands to allow collaboration.  “The bubble burst this year and we’re being scapegoated.”

Read more including an email from the student at the link below.