For officials at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, which has been beset for a year by charges of financial mismanagement and fraud, the latest news is as welcome as a root canal: At least 18 students set to graduate on Sunday from its dental school have been implicated in a cheating scandal.

Administrators at the university’s New Jersey Dental School are investigating allegations that students secretly traded, or even sold, credits for clinical procedures required for graduation, The Star-Ledger reported today. Students who had more than enough credits in some required procedures—such as filling teeth, inserting dentures, and, yes, performing root canals—allowed other students who lacked the needed credits to claim they had performed the procedures on forms documenting their clinical work.

The trades could be made because of lax supervision by faculty members who signed off on the procedures, the newspaper reported.

Thus far, audits have implicated 18 students out of a graduating class of 84. Cecile A. Feldman, dean of the dental school, said that each case would be judged individually and that penalties could range from repeating clinical work to dismissal from the program.

News of the scandal comes at a sensitive time for the dental school, which is expecting a final reaccreditation vote by the American Dental Association’s Commission on Dental Accreditation in July. Recent reports from a federal monitor appointed to oversee the troubled university have detailed a range of corruption by a host of top officials at the university (The Chronicle, April 25).