<p>Last year, one of our school's cheerleaders got into Cornell, Syracuse, Brown, Wake Forest, UNC-Chapel Hill, and UVA.</p>
<p>Everyone was impressed. Being third in the grade, having a 33 on the ACT, and having strong ec's and a tough schedule were all things that she showed well.</p>
<p>HOWEVER - She always got away with cheating. Some teachers must have suspected it, but only three were ever able to catch her in the act. Our school is soft on cheaters, so she just got a 0 on the low-point tests, and she still ended up fine as two of the tests she took for a class that was pass-fail (she almost failed, but did extra credit to pass - Human Sexuality - very tough)....</p>
<p>Anyways, with hardly any teachers in the school respecting her, and a guidance counselor who barely cares at all, SHE WROTE HER OWN REC LETTERS FROM MADE UP TEACHERS AND TOTALLY PRAISED HERSELF WHILE SOUNDING VERY REAL. She mailed them from different locations, AND GOT AWAY WITH IT! No one ever found out, except for some kids (including me) she bragged too when she was drunk!</p>
<p>Outraging! I know that she wrote them for a fact because just the other day she showed us a copy of one of them after taking the weekend off from Cornell and coming back to Ohio. </p>
<p>How did she get away with this? Do colleges really not check at all? Have you ever heard of students doing this?</p>
<p>what the hell is this? I think someone did inform the colleges, her admission would be rescinded almost immediately... </p>
<p>they usually DO refer and do a check of who wrote you rec for you - that's why the mail-back address is the TEACHER's name and not yours... wow. I can't believe she got away with this...</p>
<p>okay, me, I would inform the school, you can do it anonymously, cause if she stole stationary to do this, she committed fraud</p>
<p>the school will be really angry</p>
<p>and you would be doing others a favor</p>
<p>it wouldn't not be hard for them to check, and if she told you , you know she told others, so anyone could report her, and its not tattling to report fraud that effects everyone</p>
<p>I totally endorse turning her in. She took up a spot of some very hardworking student who do the right thing but got cheated out of their school because of a cheter. It's unforgiven!</p>
<p>How did she make up teachers? Wouldn't colleges notice that the names on the recs and the names of her teachers on her transcript didn't match up?</p>
<p>To the above poster...my school transcript doesn't put our teachers names on our letters of recommendation, I assume others are the same. One of the best science teachers at our school has been for years just letting kids write their own recs and then reading them and signing them, but last year Rice, Duke, and Berkeley all figured it out by comparing kids who applied and called our school and told them that any recommendations from this teacher will be trashed immediately and not considered.</p>
<p>I'm having trouble worrying about how honest I'm being about my hrs/week, as in, "well...I only worked 10 hours a week for 4 weeks out of the 30 I'm listing, should I bump down my average?" And this girl is doing something THAT huge?</p>
<p>Someone I asked for a letter of rec actually gave me the option of writing it myself. I actually thought about it for about 2 seconds, but then realized it was pretty low and wrong.</p>
<p>Remember this about the cheater mentioned by the OP. The cheater can be punished even after she graduates from Cornell. Her degree can be taken back by Cornell. So you can inform after a year or so, that too anonymously, but give as much detail as possible.<br>
Nobody wants to see cheaters succeed because then US would be like one of the Asian countries where there is rampant cheating in academic matters.
TURN HER IN, please.</p>
<p>Look at it this way, you will be doing her a favor in the long run by turning her in. If she does get away with this and does get her degree she will always know it isn't legit. Not to mention that someone who had to cheat to get in will probably not make it for the next four years. TURN HER IN.</p>
<p>I don't want to reveal the name of the country to you, but will give you these hints so that you can search the news archives or ask your international friends to find out which country it might be: Degree falsification to obtain employment especially in the mushrooming call centers; Degrees can be bought by making payments to University officials; Teacher recs are always given first to the applicant in open envelopes (no confidentiality; those recs are false, anyway); Wholesale cheating during the exams, etc.
How do I know this? I went there for a couple of my middle & high school years. Everyday there was some news along the above lines.
True personal experience: I was shocked when a teacher asked me to show my answer booklet to other struggling kids in the room during public exam finals. She must have thought 'this dumb white girl has no idea how we do things here,' because when I said I don't want to show my answers, she said, "Don't worry about anything, it is OK to show. Help them pass!" I still refused. I must have been crazy because one doesn't defy teachers in Asian countries!
(I must mention that the teacher never punished me for disobeying, in fact before we left to return to the US, she told me I was the best student she had ever encountered.)</p>
<p>This Asian country is China. Why don't you dare to speak it up? From what I witnessed, in that country, the majority applicants to U.S. universities write recommendations themselves (or let their parents write). Even teachers in Chinese high schools fully support this and regard such turpitude as norm. Honest students are ostracized as the mass discusses how to cheat on recs and transcripts on some Chinese-language message boards. They even invented ways to cheat on SATs and TOEFL. I was aghast at the shameless, that's-what-it's-supposed-to-be tone in which Chinese applicants exchange cheating techniques to one another. I truly hope college representatives, alumni, and admission officers who happen to go to CC take a note of this. We must not let people of such immorality besmirch our country's institutions. </p>
<p>I went to China for a year as an exchange student. Such depravity in academic matters disgusted me and made me never want to go to that country again.</p>
<p>In reply to the main post, turn her in! We must castigate every single cheater, otherwise, like someone said, our country would be as corrupted as that so-called Eastern giant.</p>
<p>colleges don't always check, but quite often they will chat informally with the GC and brink stuff up. So if someone is reading this and thinking "gee, I could do that too" I'd strongly advise against it.</p>
<p>As for the post starting this column, if it is true I'd suggest turning her in. What she did is repugnant and likely fraudulent as well. HOWEVER ... Something sounds fishy to me about the circumstances described in the post. When you submit letters of rec you typically give the stamped envelope to the teacher who mails them in. So she couldn't have intercepted the letters and substituted her own. Since she got into such prestigious schools the GC would have surely known about the acceptances, and in the buzz about it among the faculty I imagine the topic of recs would have come up. Wouldn't it have seemed suspicious if no teacher could be found who wrote the recs? But hey, if it really happened that way then by all means turn her in!</p>
<p>you could turn her in, but i doubt you'd meet with any success. I bet the schools she applied to discarded all their files. On the off chance that they still have the recommendations filed, maybe, but otherwise theres no physical evidence.</p>
<p>I personally would not have turned her in, but after reading the posts about the cheating that goes on in a certain Asian country, I've changed my mind! Let the school know. Cheating should not be tolerated.</p>
<p>Also, she may feel guilty and want to get caught. You may be doing her a favor.</p>
<p>[As for the post starting this column, if it is true I'd suggest turning her in. What she did is repugnant and likely fraudulent as well. HOWEVER ... Something sounds fishy to me about the circumstances described in the post. When you submit letters of rec you typically give the stamped envelope to the teacher who mails them in. So she couldn't have intercepted the letters and substituted her own. Since she got into such prestigious schools the GC would have surely known about the acceptances, and in the buzz about it among the faculty I imagine the topic of recs would have come up. Wouldn't it have seemed suspicious if no teacher could be found who wrote the recs? But hey, if it really happened that way then by all means turn her in!]</p>
<p>As for that...The reason she got around it was that she told all faculty members (including GC) that she used teachers that she received AP tutoring from as she did not feel that any teachers from our school would know her well enough. Everyone just suspected that she was being honest.</p>
<p>usally the envelopes are hand written by student, etc...if she faked everything, even the letter head, which is really easy to do, piece of cake, sadly enough</p>