Hi, I come here with a rather serious question. My school counselor used to give out her common app credentials to the students and asked them to submit their transcript themselves. One of the students from my class forged his transcript and greatly improved his scores and uploaded it for him.
On finding this, when we reported it to the school, they asked us to not report this to anyone as it will harm the reputation of the school.
The transcript however is in a different format from other students, who got it on a school letter head and the difference can be easily spotted
I read that colleges compare academic performances of international students within their school and this can greatly affect my chances. What should I do
Colleges have been aware of the problem with forged transcripts from overseas for several decades by now. This is nothing new to them.
If you feel that this will harm your own chances, send an anonymous communication to the colleges that you have applied to, stating that a valid transcript from your school would be on school letterhead, in such and such a format, and that you have become aware that there has been an incident of a forged transcript from your school this year.
The school should have expelled the perpetrator, and informed the colleges that the perpetrator had applied to. Clearly, the school itself has questionable values, since it is more concerned with hiding wrongdoing and protecting its reputation, than in cleaning house and correcting the wrongdoing. Unfortunately, in some countries this behavior permeates the society, from the top down. If you do something, you’d better do it anonymously, because if the school were to find out that you had “outed” them to the colleges, YOU could wind up being the one expelled.
I suspect, from a minor grammatical mistake in the posting that a native speaker would have been unlikely to have made, that the student IS an international student. And in this case, were the forgery not detected, the student is very likely to suffer significant harm. In any event, even if this school is not outside the US, the only correct response for forging a transcript is expulsion and prompt notification to all the colleges that received the transcript that a forgery has occurred, how it was permitted to happen, and what has been done to fix this so that it doesn’t happen again. This certainly does not seem to be the case, from what this student relates.
This is not, “Billy cheated on the first grade spelling test”. The student is right, that highly selective schools are unlikely to take more than one student from an overseas school, if they take one at all, and that every other student’s chances are torpedoed by that forged transcript, if it’s not caught. The students informed the school and were told to keep silent to protect the reputation of the school. They were not told that the school is doing anything to deal with what happened, and unless the OP literally just walked out of a meeting with the school an hour ago, and hasn’t yet heard through the grapevine that the perpetrator has been expelled, it seems pretty obvious that the school isn’t going to do anything, because they are more concerned about saving face than about integrity.