6 Marine Officers Bounced Amid Allegations Of Cheating On TBS Land Navigation Course

Six Marine second lieutenants who were undergoing their primary training in The Basic School at Quantico are soon to be ex-Marines after being caught cheating, officials confirmed on Tuesday.

• The six Marine officers “are currently facing allegations of misconduct surrounding the land navigation portion of the program of instruction,” Marine Corps Training and Education Command spokesman Capt. Joshua Pena said in a statement. “The six officers are being processed for administrative separation.”
• No additional information is available at this time, Pena added. Marine Corps Times first reported the news on Tuesday.
• This appears to be the largest expulsion its kind since May 2010, when 13 lieutenants were tossed from TBS in May 2010 amid revelations of “widespread” cheating on the land nav course. As Marine Corps Times noted at the time, the 13 included star Naval Academy football player Adam Ballard.
• “I that over half of the three hundred Marines in our company possessed the same information that I had and that those numbers were comparable, if not more, in all the other training companies past and present,” Ballard alleged in a letter to then-assistant secretary of the Navy Juan Garcia. “I know for a fact that majority of Marines in training often shared answers on the land navigation course and after, so that their friends could have an advantage.”

In other news, water is wet.