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That's not what happened, WVU did not fabricate records.
I was on campus quite a bit that year working with the school on some contracted research. I watched the whole thing unfold.
Heather Bresch maybe wittingly (or maybe not!) took advantage of a situation that occurred when WVU digitized their archived student records. The school botched the digitization and lost a lot of records. I do not know if they recovered the records they lost or not.
Because of this “hole” the school perhaps “innocently” gave her the benefit of the doubt regarding some of her coursework and they gave her some OJT credit. The OJT credit was what “people” were most upset about. Now whether her father then governor put any pressure on them to do this I have no way of knowing. School administrators claim they have given OJT credit before. I have heard “on the grapevine” that they have. Unfortunately no one could find any records documenting that! I have seen this done elsewhere I know of a Navy Electronic tech let into graduate program in EE, credit was given for his Navy training & years of OJT. (This was not at WVU but at a similar land grant school.) So I didn't think it was much of a “big deal”. What WVU didn't have at the time was any documentation showing precedence nor any university wide agreed upon procedures to do so. However the story was “broke” by a Pittsburgh paper and that's when the administrative panic started. You know the old saying it's not the crime but the cover-up that gets you, that's what happened here. The administrators from the school president down to the college deans tried to cover it up. The hilarious thing it was actually very explainable. However It was clear in the beginning the thing they were most embarrassed about was the botched digitization. That's what they were actually trying to cover up. So they made ridiculous excuses and things cascaded out of control. The faculty of course got on their “high horse” cited morality & academic integrity. However the Heather Bresch thing was not the reason for them wrapping themselves in their academic robes and crying “for shame!” They wanted the then WVU President gone! They hated him with a capital “H”, he wasn't an academic and he was trying to get school spending under control, stop out of control academic program expansion of shall we call them “exotic boutique degrees” and institute other actual reasonable management practices. He actually surprised me since he came up from the Jay Rockefeller wing of the WVU democrats. Well he resigned, some deans & provosts either retired or moved down an academic level and the school got a new president. Who immediately ratcheted up spending, let the faculty do whatever stupidity they liked, padded his academic resume then went I think to Auburn. He left the school horribly in debt, a trail of bad relations with local businesses that both contributed to the school and hired grads. If he was the academic puritan give me the “Heather Breach crooks back!”