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No wonder Baruch College has a cheating problem — it fires whistle-blowers.
“It’s completely nuts,” said adjunct Professor Brian Moore, who was canned last month for scolding a student who had asked for a test answer.
“They say they’re committed to stopping cheating, but they don’t really mean it,” he said. “They condone cheating. They’re coddling the students.”
Moore, 65, who taught business classes at Baruch for nine years, says he was administering a business ethics test three weeks ago when one of the 150 students taking it, marketing major Tara Kennedy, asked Moore for a hint to one of the exam’s 40 questions.
“She indicated that she didn’t understand the difference between percentage and total volume,” Moore said.
He told her to take a hike.
Had she guessed, Kennedy had a 50-50 shot at answering the true-false question about US exports.
Instead, Kennedy, 18, of Seaford, LI, asked another proctor in the same lecture hall for the answer, Moore said. Moore grabbed her answer sheet and ripped it in half.
“Her eyes were welling up,” Moore said. “I said, ‘This will be a zero, and it will be your lowest grade.’ Then I asked her to leave.”
Moore contends his comment was meant to “comfort” Kennedy — the lowest grade is dropped when computing a final grade.
Two days after the test, an associate dean contacted Moore with shocking news: He was being fired.
Baruch maintains the prof had no evidence of cheating — and no reason to discipline Kennedy.
“The instructor had displayed inappropriate and unprofessional behavior in response to a student in front of the other students in the class,” said John Brenkman, Baruch’s senior vice president for academic affairs. “Baruch College moved swiftly to remove the instructor and ensure that the students were afforded a productive and safe learning environment.”
Moore, who was untenured and earned $84 an hour, recalls two other instances when he caught cheaters. In one, a student tried to switch out answer sheets after handing in a test, and in the other, a student was sharing answers with others.
In both cases, he disciplined the students himself, Moore recalled.
“They’re very paranoid about cheating,” he said of Baruch. “I was a good soldier. I went with the program. I wanted to teach her a lesson.”
Kennedy declined to comment on the cheating accusations.
“She’s a pawn in this,” her mother, Catherine Kennedy, told The Post. “This is between [Moore] and the school.”
Cheating scandals have become commonplace at Baruch, the City University of New York’s 17,000-student business school.
The school shut down a tax-prep program in February after The Post inquired about the possible sale of answers to a certification test.
Four former grad students also alleged that a professor gave answers to pet students and that Baruch President Mitchel Wallerstein did nothing.
“I don’t know anything about it,” Wallerstein said when asked by The Post at the time.
In February, Chris Koutsoutis, an administrator at Baruch, was convicted of forging signatures to raise failing students’ grades.