Freshmen arrived at the University of Rochester on Wednesday. On Thursday, one of them was ordered to leave. It turned out she had successfully (until then) hidden the private school she had really attended from 10th through 12th grades.
The student applied using a transcript service that describes itself as helping those who are home-schooled. The transcript was official. Letters of recommendation arrived as well. The student looked promising. She was admitted, and she arrived on campus.
Thanks for posting this @sybbie719 this is going to make it harder on homeschoolers in the future. I’m wondering if it parent wasn’t involved as well.
Once again, a naive kiddo undone by deceit and social media. Will they ever learn?
I’m curious about her motivations for lying. It seems like such a strange thing to lie about. Seems like the guess is that she doctored her homeschool transcript to make it look like she had higher grades than she did, or maybe something happened on her private school transcript that she didn’t want seen.
I’m sure that she learned something from this experience (whether it’s not to engage in fraud or be better at covering her tracks). But every new generation is going to to have some gaffes, as long as social media or something like it exists.
^ to hide a disciplinary action, perhaps.
I wouldn’t consider it strange considering abysmal grades and/or disciplinary notations on one’s HS record will severely undermine the concerned applicant’s chances of admission to colleges or sometimes even some jobs/internships if they require transcripts.
A few older college classmates who crawled to graduation with exceedingly low GPAs and/or placed on academic suspension by their own admission have found it much harder to get hired for some competitive positions in which employers required college transcripts or moreso…professional/academic graduate programs.
Also, having to explain the circumstances for their abysmal grades and academic suspension to prospective employers each time they submit an application or go to an interview(assuming they made it that far) can cause some to relive the painful experiences behind them.
Considering all that, it’s not too surprising some may decide to take what may seem at the time to be an easier shortcut…however unjustified, dishonest, unwise, and yes, naive.
Does it seem odd to anyone else that no other news outlet, including the URochester campus newspaper, seems to have an article about this?
It seemed strange to me that Rochester wouldn’t name the student, the high school, the transcript service. Well, who released the news?
Unless the college pressed formal, legal charges in addition to kicking the student out, my guess is they don’t want to risk a lawsuit by making details public. I bet their legal counsel was involved in advising them.
There is absolutely no reason to out her. She was probably pressured into the scam by her parents.
I agree no reason to out her however what I don’t understand is why the private school she attended didn’t have a record of what schools she was applying to and where she had transcripts sent to… or questioned her final decision on where she was attending. Most private schools publicize that information (not by student name) but in their About Us materials and on their website usually listed the colleges/universities in which their graduates had been accepted.
Maybe she told the private schools she wasn’t going to college this year.
This.
The problem here is with “families willing to commit fraud to game college admissions” not with “homeschoolers.”
Adcoms can know transcript or schooling summary services that tend to be diligent versus those that just take what’s submitted.
We have no idea what attracted the college to this kid. It apparently went beyond the transcript.
The linked article misconstrues the application process for homeschoolers applying to selective colleges by insinuating the student only fabricated a transcript. Responses demonstrate that misunderstanding and lead to dismissing homeschooling as both a valid and legal educational option. (If homeschoolers cannot apply with a homeschool transcript, it means homeschoolers cannot apply.) As I stated earlier, the damage done by a non-homeschooled student lying and committing fraud leads to fallout on homeschoolers.
Fwiw, there is far more to this story than a fraudulent transcript, bc no, a student can not just submit a fraudulent transcript and be accepted. Every recommender and the peer (if they were even real people) had to avoid mentioning where this student went to school and their academic performance. Syllabuses, book lists, grading methodologies/educational philosophy, counselor letter, etc all had to be fabricated. The student had to bold-face lie during the admissions interview.
That leads directly to @lookingforward’s point, “We have no idea what attracted the college to this kid. It apparently went beyond the transcript.” It is impossible to know just what else this student lied about. (Based on the threads on CC, lying about ECs is obviously rampant.). But, for sure, the student excelled at lying at a deep level.
This article about Stanford and homeschool applicants illustrates that the transcript is not viewed as equivalent to a ps student’s transcript. https://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=39384
Fwiw, why do colleges admit homeschoolers who don’t have accredited transcripts? Bc the track record of their performance at their institutions validates their consideration.
This student fabricated a whole story…which included PRETENDING to be homeschooled when, in fact, she had attended a school.
This isn’t about homeschoolers gaming the system, which I don’t believe they do.
This is about blatant dishonesty…and goes way deeper than JUST the transcript submitted.
We won’t know for a while, if ever. But I wonder if she took an online class or two and got her LoR(s) from that. And for an online course, someone else could have provided a lot of help.
What strikes me is that plenty of top performers miss the mark in creating a good app package. And UR is no slouch. For now, I’m guessing the backstory made her sound like she faced all sorts of odds and still managed to do well enough. Even so, making this work isn’t simple.
I, too, fail to see this as a homeschool issue. It just seems more like fraud.
We had grades for our home educated kid, and we had outside validation (dual enrollment) and test scores.
For our son to be eligible for dual enrollment at state college/university in Florida, he had to be registered with the home ed department of our county school district (which has its own requirements). If you’re with an umbrella or private school, I think they have to have an articulation agreement for DE (?).
The fraud would be hard to pull off in Florida, if you were doing things the right way. And you’d have to do them the right way to be eligible for DE and Bright Futures.
Agree very much with @Mom2aphysicsgeek - will be unfair if this gets blamed on home education.
I can’t see this being blamed on homeschooling (as it wasn’t) but I could definitely see more scrutiny of 3rd party transcript services. I’m sure they aren’t all the same but the unnamed one involved in this instance definitely did not offer much “value added” and proved to be unhelpful to the university in this particular instance.
Despite its size, academia’s a pretty small community in a number of very meaningful ways. I’m pretty sure an already-large and continually growing-through-informal-conversations number of deans of admission are very aware of which one it was.