Photo/Illutration A building that houses St. Marianna University School of Medicine in Kawasaki, Kanagawa Prefecture (Asahi Shimbun file photo)

The Tokyo District Court on Dec. 25 ruled that a medical school in Kawasaki, Kanagawa Prefecture, rigged its entrance exam scores to favor male candidates and ordered it to compensate four female plaintiffs. 

The St. Marianna University School of Medicine’s practice of adjusting scores “discriminates against women without reasonable cause and is obviously illegal,” said the court.

The court concluded that the university had engaged in gender discrimination and ordered the university to pay a total of about 2.85 million yen ($20,040) in damages to four female plaintiffs, who took the entrance exams between fiscal 2015 and fiscal 2018.

The plaintiffs had been seeking a total of 33 million yen in damages from the university.

A series of medical school admissions fraud cases was uncovered in 2018. The education ministry investigated and found that several universities, including St. Marianna, had treated women and “ronin” students unfavorably.

St. Marianna denied any discriminatory treatment, but a third-party committee established by the university found that female applicants had uniformly received lower scores.

The court ruled that “it is clear that the scores were adjusted according to gender,” citing the report of the third-party committee.

The committee found a uniform difference in the scores given to male and female applicants, and also the results of mock scoring, in which gender and other factors were blacked out, differed significantly from the actual scores given.

The university declined to comment on the ruling.

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