Eric Manuel

Who is Eric Manuel?

Eric Manuel is an American former college basketball player.

Born in Macon, Georgia; Manuel made the Parade and McDonald's All-America teams as a high school senior in 1987. The 6-foot-6-inch small forward/shooting guard signed with the Kentucky Wildcats, and broke into the starting lineup by the middle of his freshman year. He was named to the all-Southeastern Conference freshman team.

Just before the start of his sophomore season, however, questions surfaced about his college admissions exams. Manuel had fallen short of a qualifying score on his previous attempts to take the SAT and ACT. When he took the ACT at Lafayette High School in Lexington—home to UK—he finally got a passing score. In July 1989, as part of a larger probe into the Wildcat program, the NCAA investigated Manuel's test scores after finding out he had made a dramatic nine-point improvement when he took his last ACT. When Manuel took the ACT at Lafayette High, 211 of a possible 219 answers were the same as those of another student, Chris Shearer. To the NCAA, this suggested that Manuel had cheated. Indeed, according to ACT officials, there was only a two-in-a-million chance that two students' answers could have resembled each other so closely without cheating.