<p>A CCer asked me to post a link about this astounding news story </p>
<p>Man</a> accused of duping Harvard got into Stanford - latimes.com </p>
<p>here to the Parents Forum. I'd love to hear your comments.</p>
<p>At least they rescinded it later.</p>
<p>I’d love to read his essays. I know that it’s supposed to be a crapshoot to get into either of those institutions, but there must be something compelling and unusual in his app to get into two elite institutions.</p>
<p>I think this guy will follow M. Jones’s track after his future admittance to jail and release from jail.</p>
<p>This guy will have a very successful career as a college application consultant!</p>
<p>I need this person to help my brood get into a good college!</p>
<p>Geez, this kid knows how to get into some amazingly selective schools. These schools claim they don’t just use test scores (which he faked) and gpa (which he faked), so I wonder how he parlayed his application to get in.</p>
<p>That’s what I mean. He’s gotten the golden ticket twice. What’s he doing, besides making it all up??? LOL</p>
<p>He <em>is</em> making it all up. You can find his resume online. It’s outstanding . . . aside from the fact that it looks like the resume of a really outstanding recent Ph.D. or Assistant Professor, and the books and talks claimed on the resume are actually singly authored by faculty. And his letters of recommendation were fake, too.</p>
<p>People who argue that the admissions committees have some special insight into the potential or character of applicants will have a harder time persuading me of that, thanks to this case. I do have to credit Yale admissions with wondering, “What’s up with this?” They rejected him–but even they called his parents to ask about him.</p>
<p>^^^ Yes, here’s a link to his resume. With what he made up, why wouldn’t he get into Harvard and Stanford? What other undergrad could compare to this? <a href=“http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/75025/adam-wheelers-resume[/url]”>http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/75025/adam-wheelers-resume</a></p>
<p>That’s true, I saw his resume and wondered how anyone could have accomplished so much in just 22 years. Grades, books, talks. Nonetheless, he also had to fill out those applications and write a few specific-to-their-prompts essays. The schools didn’t just accept him because he had an impressive (and fake) resume. He also must have had pretty amazing essays too, as YDS wrote.</p>
<p>I am most impressed with Yale. They sniffed it out, unlike Harvard and now Stanford.</p>
<p>This case is easy. Give him a passage of Old English to sight-translate, and see how well he does.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>Nope. Yale did not sniff it out. They rejected him because they were tipped off to the fraud by his parents. Without that warning I bet they would have been duped too. I’m much more impressed with his parents than with Yale.</p>
<p>Actually, coureur, that’s not the sequence of events as I heard it. Do I have the facts wrong? I had the impression that the people at Yale were suspicious–as who would not have been, given the resume?–and called the parents for verification . . . at which point the parents told Yale where the student had gone to high school and where he had started college.</p>
<p>(I might know one person out of my entire set of acquaintances who would falsely “verify” where his son had gone to high school.)</p>
<p>His resume doesn’t give his date of birth…otherwise you would have to be suspicious of how much he had supposedly accomplished by age 20. “Scholar in residence”? Come on.</p>
<p>What about that old saw, “if it looks too good to be true, it probably isn’t”?</p>
<p>He lists 15 prizes awarded to him over two years at Harvard.</p>
<p>Is any of that true?</p>
<p>Sadly, I think that at least one of the prizes was awarded to the student in question, for a paper written by another student but submitted by him.</p>
<p>The resume we’ve seen is the one that he submitted for an internship. We haven’t seen his college applications. Given how wily this guy was, I would not be surprised if the application resumes were different (and perhaps more plausible) from the internship resume. We can’t assume he made identical claims everywhere.</p>
<p>I tell my students all the time: different job, different resume. He may have taken that principle and run with it.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>You’re right. Yale did call his parents first. Yale deserves more credit than I thought.</p>
<p>Yale also called his high school. The principal was asked to verify the fact that Wheeler graduated in 2007–he actually graduated in 2005–and was valedictorian of his class–he wasn’t. The principal was stunned by the misrepresentations. </p>
<p>At this point, Yale called Wheeler to ask him to explain the fact that the high school said the info wasn’t true. (Sometimes, high schools do blow it; there could be, e.g., two Adam Wheelers.) They called Wheeler at his parents’ home (where he was living at the time), got one of his parents instead of Wheeler, and explained the reason for the call.
Wheeler’s parents then talked to him. </p>
<p>Yale already knew the high school record wasn’t accurate when it made the phone call to Wheeler, which his parents intercepted.</p>
<p>Like Hanna, I think this guy made different resumes for different purposes. He was also admitted to some special maritime program at Williams College. I assume he gave very different credentials to be admitted to it.</p>