@T26E4 Doesn’t it bother you that ever year a certain percentage of students may get into these top schools with fabricated extracurriculars? What if it was someone who was an already stellar student but decided to fabricate parts of his/her application to gain an advantage in admission?
I’ve heard of this Indian student who initially got rejected from medical school and then decided to apply as an African American to gain admission.
He was already dark skinned so most people couldn’t tell the difference but the medical school never caught him and in fact it was only after he dropped out of medical school that he revealed this to appeal against affirmative action. I mean could you imagine someone fabricating their own race/ identity?
@bodangles Not too far fetched if you recognized the mess I participated in and the amount of time since I last did such a thing.
@T26E4 I agree, those that needed to lie on their application generally don’t have too much to show anyways. At the point where the applicant believes that adding 50-100 community service hours to their application would potentially change the decision from rejected to accepted, you can assume they’re uncertain about the quality of their app and possibly don’t understand how little such a thing means to your decision and how stretching the truth in such a manner is more harmful than good, in the end, they probably deserve the blacklist.
What often happens is that someone who gets away with a lie here and another one there, eventually gets tripped up, and then their entire history is opened up for scrutiny. As an manager, I’ve seen this happen at companies where someone’s performance is poorer than expected based on their supposed work history. Once you start going back, all kinds of little discrepancies begin to add up and they are fired in a heartbeat. Sometimes a jealous co-worker or class-mate actually rats out a colleague. (Yes, I’ve had to deal with that.) The same happens when someone comes up for disciplinary action at their college (or for any public position later in life) - once the records get reopened, they are toast. D won a prestigious award and there were articles in the newspaper locally reiterating her high school accomplishments because the local high school wanted to boost ‘their’ graduate. If any of those had been faked, it would have been humiliating to say the least.
Bottom line, if you lie on an application, you may get away with it, but you will never be safe.
I have a few more question in mind. What if you’ve taken extracurriculars you couldn’t prove? I mean you can’t have evidence for every extracurricular you’ve taken part in and if you don’t does the university suspect that you’re lying?
And finally if you’re an international or have studied abroad isn’t it harder for a university to look back at your school record?
You don’t have space to list every EC you’ve done; you choose the most meaningful. I can’t imagine a case where you could not “prove” a meaningful EC that could not be verified by an adult associated with said EC, but if you want to give an example…
No. Universities are familiar with educational systems around the world.
I would suspect that for a brits like you assuming you have no international awards or the like, that your ECs are a very minor issue compared with academics. If you have your DofE, you will have documentation, if you do school based ECs, the info will come from the school, if you help little old ladies cross the road? 4 yrs in the Brownies? No one will give a stuff. EC stress seems very much a domestic student issue for tippy tops.
@Alfonsia If I list my extracurriculars based on the ones I can prove and the ones I can’t would this make it easier:
EC’s that can be proven: 200 hour millennium volunteer award certificate(official signature of first minister and welsh government stamp)2 years, Volunteer abroad a few weeks, Crest silver and gold research award certificate, Gold Biology Olympiad round 1 certificate, Gold Maths challenge, Organizer of the charity committee 2 years, Founder of the basketball club 2 years, Table Tennis club, Soccer club 2 years, High sports leadership award level 3 certificate(basically a coaching qualification), DofE bronze and silver,student council.
EC’s that can’t be proven: 1 year volunteered as a scout leader, Hours of other volunteering that wasn’t kept track of or recorded.
Your GC recommendations will usually corroborate anything you claim to have done. If it is a major award/activity, it will be easy to check and you can be sure that they will (ex: national awards), and if it is something medium-sized the GC or recommenders will likely mention it; if not, they may check in with the GC to confirm. If it’s really, really small it won’t affect your app anyway.
You shouldn’t lie (obviously because it’s morally wrong) but also because if they ever find out that you lied, even after getting in, completing your four years, and getting your degree, they can easily revoke your degree and you end up pretty bad off.