@CCDD14 I don’t think they come with a transcript from a different high school however. At least not that I’ve heard of. Or do they give the answers to the SAT you are about to take.
There are, of course, cheating scams in the US - some athletes that took the ACT and were told to leave any hard answers blank - and those got mysteriously filled in correctly, for instance.
But problem is how to detect the blatant fraud. Perhaps a post-admit review of docs (since there is rarely time in the admissions process) and expulsion for anyone caught cheating. That might clean it up a bit. But few schools will put their resources toward something like that.
@sylvan8798 I would expect there are a good number of ways to catch cheaters. I recall they caught either the Chicago or Georgia(?) teachers who bubbled in for their kids, because the easy answers were missed fairly randomly, but the hard answers were all the same.
My guess is our good friends at SAT/AP inc. don’t want to spend the money - heck, they don’t want to spend the money on new tests, which is the main way the tests get jobbed in Asia now anyway.
But the cheating seems to include also essays, phony transcripts, phony or edited rec. letters. I would think if the schools spot-checked questionable or incongruous applications and tossed out fraudsters, it would have a bit of a wet-blanket effect, but if I was a college I’m not sure I’d want to put my limited resources to that kind of enforcement. I’d probably figure - they’re in, the check cleared, if they can’t cut it, they’ll fail.
Then I can spend my time teaching. I used to think it was unfair that some schools require full test reporting. I now think that should be the norm: take an ACT or SAT and every school you apply to gets all scores. Then it’s much harder to job the system by multiple testing, tutors or cheating.
But more importantly, test scores should get less weight in admissions. They are no better predictors than GPA with an eye to rigor. They are just easier to look at.
The WSJ article is about cheating by international students at US schools.
I only read a summary, and it doesn’t mention cheating on applications. It is a study of cheating of the students once here. Some instances include a “lost ID scam” reportedly used a UC Irvine so “ringers” could take a test.
I will note that the study states “reports of alleged cheating” so these are not confirmed instances. Still 5 to 1 is a pretty wide gulf in reporting and certainly bears serious investigation.
It is not stereotyping but stating a fact that there are cultural differences between countries as regards cheating. With student demographics changing because colleges are admitting more and more international students, colleges may have to evolve not just in their teaching, but also in their assessment methods.
Countries in which cheating is not taken as a serious violation of academic integrity but as a matter of course include countries in which education is seen more as a credentialling system rather than a teaching system, and in which schools are not seen so much as a public service than as a public gatekeeper to opportunities. (I live in such a country).
The problem is that cultural habits and attitudes are so deeply ingrained they persist over generations, beyond the upheaval of migration and changing countries and languages (not a great fan of Malcolm Gladwell but the chapters on the research on the persistence of cultural attitudes in Outlier are really enlightening).
And just telling students about strict expectations is useless unless those expectations are actually policed - if an institution lets a student from country where cheating is positively sanctioned take an unproctored or even a take home exam, the student will wonder whether the institution actually cares as much as they say. If there is no way to tell who has written an application essay, the student or a parent or a tutor, a student from such a country will believe that no one will write their essays without substantial help anyway and that they will be at a disadvantage when doing so.
As a good student, I grew up with the constant pressure of helping others cheat. It was a kind of honour code among students all by themselves, and if the teachers were outsmarted, serve them right. I have had my papers ripped away from me in high school during the actual (proctored) exam so another could copy it more easily. I finally resisted when I was asked to take an exam for another student (while the exam itself was proctored, there were no ID checks, because the grade did not count for the final GPA, simply for advancement, with the consequence that cheating wasn’t considered that serious. At the time, if you were caught, you could have simply retaken the class next semester). I refused because I was afraid of the consequences of being caught (the friend was planning to drop out anyway, but did not want to drop out having failed the class). The (casual) friend was at first incredulous, then angry. They thought they deserved the “support” and that it was unfair to keep my exam taking skills for myself, just as if we had still been kids. The friendship never recovered.
I was glad when the university soon after introduced ID checks, because it meant that the institution took thier own exams more seriously and expected the same from their students. It is a disservice to ALL students not to address cheating.
Academic integrity and the corresponding trust in the system in the US is a very precious cultural trait I believe, something quite unique in industrialized countries. I wish that institutions would find ways to address teaching academic integrity to all their students without compromising this trust.