Question: i am an international student . my friend has manipulated his transcript and has got the stamp and signatures of the principal . he has created a fake counselor ID extremely similar to the one used at school , fake letters of rec with stamp . the documents are exactly the same as the originals (with fake grades obviously ). he wants to apply to ivies . UIUC . UC . purdue . georgia tech , stanford , MIT .
Provided he gets SAT scores to match his marks and letters of rec ,whats the chances he gets caught cheating ?
How about you, the friend, alert the universities in question? That’s the honest thing to do. Faking international transcripts is epidemic, and staying silent when you witness dishonesty appears to be the new go-to stance.
@jym626-I don’t know. I couldn’t tell from the email address that the question came in from. “Ask the Dean” queries are typically anonymous (except for the email address) and–even when they’re not–I never share any identifying details. But, in this case, there weren’t any details to share. I did also wonder about the country involved because applications from some countries can be examined more painstakingly than applications from others.
This person has a moral obligation to prevent his friend from getting away with this, if it’s possible for the person to do so. That’s potentially one seat at a university that could be wrongfully taken from a student who truly deserves it.
I think cases like this are why colleges in general insist on “official” reports for transcripts, test scores, etc. straight from the source. Evidently done out of desperation, but it won’t work out well.
Especially as an international student, if ‘your friend’ got caught doing this, there could be serious consequences. You would be obtaining a student visa on the pretense of false information. This is not a situation that you, or ‘your friend’ want to be in.
I realize it’s epidemic, but cheating baffles me. If one can’t get IN to a school on one’s own merits, how is one going to survive once one gets there? More cheating? It’s stupid. Don’t do it.
In admissions and job applications etc, the requirements are often honestly at least a little bit in excess of what is necessary to do well there. In that light, it’s understandable why slight exaggeration would be permissible.
That said, straight-up lying will end quite poorly in all cases. Doing well will be tough but the very real fear of being found out and having your entire degree revoked is worse. The qualified individuals, even when they do exaggerate and lie to some extent, know that they do so in a way that is really inconsequential (e.g. saying “I know how to do X” when they mean “I will learn X in time for it to become relevant”).
Most HS students (despite what they think) aren’t sharp enough or experienced enough to pull it off on their own. That requires them to enlist the aid of others, paid or not and that puts their cheating at even greater risk of discovery and disaster.
Fudging a little bit on the ole resume like playing a little fast-n-loose with service hours or something probably isn’t going to take notice unless it’s incredibly unrealistic. “Polishing” ECs is probably standard fare for a lot of high achievers out there.
However, what this foreigner did is a ground-up forgery and probably not going to fly. There are serious consequences for faking EVERYTHING. I am curious though just how far he went, especially with the contact information like setting up fake phone lines or something.
I realize that the “don’t snitch” ethos is very strong, and while I understand some of the arguments made in favor of it, in the end I think that mentality and ethical stance fails. To severely paraphrase the words of Edmund Burke (presumably), the only thing required for cheating to flourish is for honest people to do nothing.
Imagine that the university has 25,000 applicants, of whom, it thinks 20,000 are capable of doing the work, but will admit about 3,000 of those students. This is about moving oneself (dishonestly and immorally) from the batch of 17,000 rejectees who can do the work to the batch of 3,000 who get accepted.
‘Lying’ to some degree is fairly standard on college applications I think. Making ECs seem more significant than they may actually be is essentially standard procedure, but it’s not really ‘lying.’ It’s more like ‘creativity’ in some sense. Making up some type of honorary awards and things like that are perhaps fairly common as well. I don’t mean things like claiming to be a national math competition champion, or national science fair champion. Those kinds of things are going to get verified. But claiming to be the president of the club that won an award for most active student organization on campus or something like that? Nobody is going to check into that. It’s probably not going to give any kind of advantage in admissions either, but that doesn’t prevent it from happening.
Skieurope beat me to it. There is a big difference between using good (but accurate) descriptors or adjectives in ones resume or activity list, and emphasizing their accomplishments, vs embellishing or flat out lying. Exaggerating or “creating” is lying. Plain and simple.