A former classmate of Mylan Inc. executive Heather Bresch states that Ms. Bresch said no one was going to force her to take a standardized test that was a requirement for most students seeking admission to West Virginia University's executive M.B.A. program.

Ms. Bresch, the daughter of West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin, said this week she did not take the Graduate Management Admission Test, the graduate school equivalent of the SAT that colleges use to screen applications for undergraduate programs.

"She joked she didn't have to take it and nobody was going to make her take it," said Barbara Shaw, a member of the M.B.A. program's December 1998 graduating class. "Her attitude was less than wonderful."

Ms. Bresch said she earned her degree at the same time, a statement disputed by WVU's registrar Oct. 11. Ms. Shaw questions the statement.

"I know she didn't complete the class at the time," she said. "She would show up periodically. ... There were long periods [when] she was not there."

Efforts to contact Ms. Bresch have been unsuccessful.

Days after the registrar's original statement, WVU awarded the master's of business administration degree retroactively to Ms. Bresch, citing the business school's failure to transfer records for her course work to the Office of Admissions and Records, the university's official records keeper.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported Dec. 21 that a review of university records found that after the decision to award the degree was made, WVU officials added 22 credits to Ms. Bresch's transcript, nearly half of the 48 credits the degree required. The additions included adding six courses, with grades, that previously were not on her record and changing two classes listed as "incomplete" to letter grades.

The decision is being investigated by a five-member panel that will submit its report to Provost Gerald Lang, who is one of the WVU officials whose actions are being reviewed. Mr. Lang is expected to receive the report in a matter of days.

How much of the panel's findings will be made public is a matter of discussion on the Morgantown campus given Ms. Bresch's ties, not only to her father but to Mylan Chairman Milan Puskar and WVU President Michael Garrison. Mr. Puskar is WVU's largest benefactor and Mr. Garrison, a high school classmate and family friend of Ms. Bresch, previously served as a lobbyist for the Cecil-based generic drug maker.

Since the Dec. 21 story, WVU officials have offered various, often contradictory, explanations of how they made the decision -- including acknowledgements by Mr. Lang and business school Dean R. Stephen Sears that they lacked the records to show Ms. Bresch completed the degree.

This week, Ms. Bresch, who has declined to speak to the Post-Gazette since October, broke more than five months of public silence and offered a new explanation. She told other news organizations that she made arrangements in September 1998 with Paul Speaker, then director of the executive M.B.A. program, to use work experience to earn 10 credits she needed to graduate that December. WVU added more than twice as many credits when they modified her transcript six months ago.

Mr. Speaker, now a WVU finance professor, declined to comment on Ms. Bresch's statements about work-related credits and not taking the GMAT test, citing privacy issues.

He said students could provisionally be admitted to the M.B.A. program without taking the standardized test, but the waiver would have carried a requirement to take the exam by a specified date. Depending on a student's other credentials, the program could have imposed a requirement that the student earn a minimum score on the test, Mr. Speaker said.

According to the 1996-98 graduate school catalog, a student may "gain provisional admittance to the part-time (M.B.A.) program for one semester only" before being required to take the exam. The catalog also said the test requirement could be waived for students with master's or doctoral degrees, a circumstance that did not apply to Ms. Bresch.

Mr. Speaker said the 48-credit program included 42 credits from required courses and six credits from electives. Students rarely pursued independent study credits at the time Ms. Bresch was in the program and could have received a maximum of six credits for each independent study course, Mr. Speaker said.

"It would have been an extraordinary circumstance" for a student at that time to do a lot of independent study, he said.

The course would be listed as "independent study" on WVU's records and his name would have been listed as the instructor during the period he headed the M.B.A. program, Mr. Speaker said.

WVU records show that only four of the 22 credit hours added to Ms. Bresch's transcript in October were listed as independent study, an identification that might reflect work-related credits. Mr. Speaker was listed as the instructor.

However, the credits were recorded as having been earned in the summer of 1998, before Ms. Bresch says she made arrangements with Mr. Speaker.

Three classes, all of them identified as standard course offerings and worth a total of eight credits, were recorded as having been earned in the fall of 1998.