<p>I've spent a couple of years watching folks on CC obsessing about admissions officers - what they know, what they don't know, what they want, think or like, etc. As it turns out, admissions isn't the exact science people like to think that it is, and apparently Admissions officers aren't always paying very much attention when reading applications:</p>
<p>The public schools in the state of Texas are required to use certain abbreviations on the official transcript. Some are really difficult to decipher. When I sent Son’s mid-year transcript to his favorite school, he received about $4000 a year in extra merit money because the admissions officer had missed one math class and one AP class on his first review of the transcript. Kinda of scary.</p>
<p>Really, it doesn’t surprise me much at all. We’ve all read about applications going through the roof, especially at the country’s better known colleges and universities.</p>
<p>Have you read about a proportional increase in admissions staff? I haven’t. I’ve read about belt-tightening in college administration. And that trend is going to continue as colleges and universities confront the reality that they can’t keep raising their tuition and fees much faster than inflation, as they’ve done for decades.</p>
<p>Wow. Just…wow. That doesn’t exactly point favorably to the Harvard admissions committee…especially singe Phillips is one of their usual “feeder” prep schools - you would think that they would be familiar with the Phillips trimester system.</p>
<p>This is clearly an embarrassing mistake on Harvard’s part. But where the Phillips expertise is concerned, transfer applicants are evaluated separately and divvied up based on their current college, not their high schools or home towns. So where all the freshman applicants from Phillips would be evaluated together by readers who know Phillips well, transfer readers might be seeing a Phillips transcript for the first time. My guess is they won’t overlook this again.</p>
<p>People who you expect to do things certain ways can easily be not so careful. I found that out last year applying for internships. I received so many letters back that had mistakes it was unbelievable. Wrong dates, typos, one was sent to the wrong person, etc.</p>
<p>One thing I wish the article mentioned was how he eventually did get caught… anyone know?</p>
<p>It sounds to me like this guy is probably a little delusional and loony. Who the hell even dreams of pulling that off?</p>
<p>Most of the story can be found here:
[Harvard</a> Faker Adam Wheeler Pleads Guilty to 20 Counts | The Harvard Crimson](<a href=“http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2010/12/16/harvard-wheeler-college-guilty/]Harvard”>Harvard Faker Adam Wheeler Pleads Guilty to 20 Counts | News | The Harvard Crimson)</p>
<p>He basically got a little too greedy and decided to apply for a Rhodes Scholarship with essays he’d plagiarized. Harvard professors noticed, looked into his history, and found a continuous web of lies.</p>
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<p>After running into some trouble at Harvard for plagiarism, Wheeler applied to transfer to Yale. It was really Yale that put the pieces together and exposed him, as far as I know.</p>
<p>The Crimson has covered it pretty extensively. Most of that coverage is still available online.</p>
<p>Wow… according to the Crimson article he would have graduated from Harvard if he hadn’t continued to apply for scholarships and grants, and a Harvard professor hadn’t FINALLY noticed that he was plagiarizing his scholarship essays. But his admissions lies would have gone undetected.</p>
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<p>In other words the title of this thread could be “Harvard Admissions Officers not as careful as Yale Admissions Officers”.??</p>
<p>:)</p>
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<p>But is that part really surprising? After a class has matriculated, should the adcom really devote itself to ongoing fact-checking on the enrolled students?</p>
<p>Obviously this was a huge mistake in admitting the careless con artist but as others have noted, the number of applications has skyrocketed while the number of admissions officers has not. There are things you can and can’t control; you can’t make the colleges hire more admissions staff but you can keep the reality of the process in mind when sifting through the glossy advertising hype flooding the mailbox of you and your high performing high school student. </p>
<p>Along with the enormous volume of applications that admissions officers are required to read during their reading season, the typical admissions officer is relatively inexperienced. The Wesleyan admissions officer profiled in The Gatekeepers is the exception, not the rule. It is not unusual for admissions officers to be fresh recruits from recent graduating classes, who will move on to graduate or professional school within a three to five year period, no matter how dedicated, few of them would be considered highly experienced.</p>
<p>bchan, that’s a good point. Another thing to remember is that while from the applicant’s perspective the admissions officers are important people with a lot of power…within a university, they’re complete nobodies with little influence. Even the dean of admissions is a person of relatively humble status, and the officers themselves rank somewhere near the secretaries and cooks. They get pay and benefits commensurate with that low rank. So they’re not really in a position to demand more resources. They get what they get, and the powers that be at different schools may or may not budget for them as though they matter.</p>
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<p>True. But a lot of this could be avoided by a simple and quick screening process for applications. Require everyone to send in a one-page pre-application with the most pertinent information. Screen out 70% of all applicants and then focus on the remaining 30%, offering admission to about 1 in 3 of them. It would make life a lot easier for everyone.</p>
<p>^^^The most “pertinent information”? And that would be test scores and grades, with an abbreviated list of EC’s, right? My S would have never gotten into college.</p>
<p>This is pretty ridiculous. As a current high school senior, it’s also rather distressing. Sure, I know admissions officers are humans, liable to make mistakes.</p>
<p>But the mistakes detailed in this article lead me to believe the admissions officer skipped over parts of the application. That’s the only plausible explanation that the officer did not catch the obvious inconsistencies. There wasn’t just one problem with Wheeler’s application; there were a ton.</p>
<p>And to think, I slave over my essays…</p>
<p>If they can’t deal with the increased applicant flow, then why do they continue to encourage applications? Why do they tell prospective students, “there’s no GPA cut-off.” Sure there is! Has anyone with a 2.0 ever gotten in??? Why not try to weed-out students who obviously have no shot, rather than increasing applications and creating more work?!?!</p>
<p>Oh. Right. US News and World Reports…</p>
<p>quomodo, you’re wise to be skeptical about the admissions hype. I suggest to friends that they check out each school’s most recent common data set to see how many current freshman had high school GPAs in their student’s range before applying. But I’d never have known what common data sets were without CC.</p>
<p>When I first read this thread title, I thought it would be about simple careless errors that most of us make on the job each day. In an admissions office, that could be misreading a transcript, transposing the digits in a SAT score if they’re input manually (a 570 is not as impressive as a 750 …), etc. I used to wonder, when I’d read adcoms say that they could field as strong a class from many rejected students as from the accepted ones - what would happen if someone grabbed the wrong pile and sent acceptances to the rejected kids? I imagine it would eventually be discovered, but what a mess to straighten out.</p>
<p>This wasn’t minor oversights. This was huge blatant inconsistencies and things that made no sense. 16 AP courses - all 5’s? Some taken in 8th grade? Taking 7 courses at a time at a very well known prep school where the standard load is 5 classes? And worse, dates that didn’t line up - an application that says 2 years at Phillips, and a transcript that shows 4 years? And an essay that made no sense - did they even read it?</p>
<p>This goes beyond a few errors that could have been missed at a quick glance. Perhaps the secret to getting into Harvard is to apply as a transfer student, because they didn’t look at this kid’s app at all.</p>
<p>What is even scarier is that plagiarized scholarship applications apparently went undetected as well, because he won several awards before he was caught.</p>