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Law students cheat? Surely not. Particularly to win a ‘virtual trophy’ for a Law Review Video competition.

But no, that was the case outlined in a strongly-worded missive on AbovetheLaw by publisher David Lat, who wrote that the stats for alleged visitors and votes for the competition were revealed as being falsified – ie ‘cheating’ – in an audit undertaken by The University of Pennsylvia Law School, which showed what they called “rampant cheating” by Columbia, UVA and NYU.

Cheating, they wrote.

The UPenn Law letter noted “They (Syracuse) always had the best video (and also, OMG, just a general not giving a s**t about, like, needing to cheat to win a virtual trophy???). I mean, c’mon, Syracuse be throwing delicious shade while those T-3 A**holes be gunnering about trying to get the A+ at any cost. Honey, try emotional fulfillment for once, and a little work/life balance. I promise, you’ll be happier.

In summary:

Between April 26 at 6:19pm (web cache permalink) and April 27 at 12:30am, over 7,000 votes were cast for the top 3 videos.
During this 12:30am time frame, NYU, Columbia, and UVA had more votes (15,704; 13,950; 9,706, respectively) than YouTube views (9,686; 6,123; 4,956; Penn: 5,431; SU; 7,406; UT: 3,803)
At one point, Columbia increased by 1,716 votes in 52 minutes. Compare 12:30am with 1:22am. This is an average of 33 votes a minute, or, a vote every other second.
Between 2:08am and 10:54am, an additional 8,000 votes were cast, putting the top 3 within spitting distance of each other, at around 17,000 votes each, almost entirely due to UVA’s last ditch 5,400 vote push (that didn’t even work).

This shows more than 100,000 votes being cast in the contest. But we know, thanks to WordPress and Google Analytics, that the contest voting page did not receive anything close to 100,000 pageviews.

A contest winner? Sorry, Columbia and NYU and UVA — we award you no points, and may character and fitness have mercy on your soul.