Odds of Getting Caught Sending Fake Admissions Credentials?

Archive Ask The Dean Archive
21

My thoughts exactly. What is the student going to do when his/her counselor sends the schools in question a transcript, and the two transcripts don’t match? Or when the admissions officer calls to say “congratulations, XXX has been accepted to XYZ university” and the counselor replies “How? He/she never asked me to send a transcript or read his/her application?”

Maybe this student is willing to take the risk that at 40 or 50 he/she need to explain to his family/friends/employer why his college degree was revoked. The list of things I’d rather do is long, and running a marathon over hot coals isn’t the half of it.

This is all without considering the obvious moral issue here. A college education is something you can look back on with pride for the rest of your life, and nobody can take that achievement away from you. Having that education tainted, if only in your own mind, by the ever-present idea that you don’t deserve it is something I would wish on very few people.

22

Wise words, @NotVerySmart.

23

Well guess what: when you create an environment that encourages low-level cheating (in that you are at a substantial disadvantage if you are 100% truthful), then people will tend to do just that. And it’s not because “everyone does it” but because “doing things by the book” all the time ends up being a small but substantial advantage in a world that rewards exaggeration and getting away with small lies.

24

Hogwash, NeoDymium. They are not “creating an environment that encourages low level cheating”. To the contrary. Cheaters will look for or fined every opportunity to cheat. Exaggeration is lying. Don’t do it. And don’t try to rationalize it by externalizing blame.

25

Another issue is that if a school discovers an applicant has faked accomplishments or documents it’s very likely to hurt future applicants from the student’s high school, as the college can’t rely on the school to send the correct information or weed out cheaters. At schools with large applicant pools it’s easier for the admissions office to simply disregard the supposed credentials of an applicant from a school from which they’ve received faulty and/or forged application materials in the past than to spend a tremendous amount of time trying to verify the information in the file.

26

No, this simply isn’t true, although it probably would be better if it were. It’s true that it would be better if no one did it, but the fact is that more > less, and unless you start putting things that are demonstrably wrong on your resume (i.e. what the “friend” in question is doing), you will end up appearing more impressive than if you would if you did not do so.

Do you also object to people painting themselves in a favorable light? To say that their contributions were important to the success of a project when they were really of only moderate importance? To say that they are proficient at a skill when they mean that they are decent and expect to become better? That’s the extent of what exaggeration is, really - to paint yourself in such a way that you spend less time having to prove you aren’t bad (the necessity which is a tremendous disadvantage in any form of interview, because you are less likely to get it and less likely to do well when you get there). If you think that that is equivalent to forging your transcripts and sending objectively false information that would get your degree revoked if it was found out, then I must say that your opinion is very far removed from reality.

27

No, the examples you give are boldfaced lies. Try to rationalize it all you want, but if you aren’t proficient, use a different adjective. Fluent (if TRUE) , conversant, whatever is ACCURATE and true. Saying something that isn’t true is a LIE. It isn’t a matter of degree, like you seem to want to believe.

If a person increased membership in their organization by 25%, they shouldnt say 50%. And if they raised 20% more money than in past years, they can say “more” , but probably saying “significantly more” is an embellishment. Maybe not an outright lie. But if they said 45% more when the truth was 25% more, thats a lie. Try to rationalize all you want. Its a lie, and should be discouraged.

Saying something they did was helpful, or important or beneficial may be a matter of opinion. If it truly was insignificant (they collected tickets at one table of one event), then claiming their input was significant or of some leadership role is probably a lie. Just.Don’t. Lie.

Your strawman argument is pointless. Forging documents is clearly grounds for revocation. Lying is a moral issue. We can see where you sit on this.

28

No, they are opinions, in which you are giving yourself the benefit of the doubt in almost all cases (which any sane person would do and any sane admissions committee would expect and probably encourage you to do). And I’m not sure why you think that 20% is not “significantly more” when many would agree that it would be quite fair to say that it was. Again, if you think that something like that is comparable to forging transcripts, then I will simply have to say that you are completely off-base.

29

Opinions?? NO, if they are not truthful, they are LIES. If you are NOT fluent but “hope to be”, then you are NOT fluent. Time for an ethics course for you. And repeating your strawman argument is also pointless. This is clearly falling on deaf ears. If a consultant was working with you and you wanted to lie (oh, excuse me, I mean “paint yourself in a better light”) on your resume or activities sheet, they would dissuade you or discontinue working with you. Its simply unethical to embellish. Its a lie. Period.

30

What the liars, sociopaths, self delusional and simply ignorant don’t realize is that it doesn’t take much conflation to make something look odd or out of place. So, whether they are lying on purpose or because they simply don’t know any better, someone’s attention will fall upon it sooner or later.

31

My example of raising significantly more $ would have been clearer if the increase was, say 2%. Saying significantly is an exaggeration, but claiming proficiency in a language when one is not, but its aspirational, is a lie.

32

In my opinion, if you have definitive knowledge of someone’s forgery and choose not to say anything about it, you are part of the problem. While I do think that colleges have some responsibility in checking applicants, they can’t be expected to carefully review every single applicant and in my experience those who cheat on apps are cheaters in other parts of their life too.
I recently had a friend present me with a perfect recording for their arts supplement. I have played side by side with this person for two years and the recording was clearly not her playing. I could have chosen not to say anything and was actually advised on college confidential to mind my own business. Imagine that she and your child were applying to top schools and her stats were identical to those of your child’s except for a top of the line, forged, arts supplement. They choose her over your child because I chose to mind my own business, I am in a small way responsible for that. I chose to contact her teacher, who was completely unaware of any recording being made and was also of the opinion that the recording was not her playing. He then contacted our orchestra conductor, who had done one of her recommendations.
There are people who would criticize me for “tattling” but most people would change their tune if they found that she was a competitive applicant to their child’s top choice school… She’s not interested in my top choice school. I don’t benefit in any way, except for maybe later on in RD, from bringing this to someones attention, but not saying anything makes me complicit in her lying.

33

In regards to the “exaggeration” on college apps, it is everywhere and while I think that you should be creative in explaining you EC’s and the impact they have had on you and your community, in order to avoid them turning into the same EC’s that everyone else writes, there is a fine line between being creative and lying. I understand that it’s just an estimate, but you really couldn’t possible be innocent in estimating over twice as many hours.
What I don’t understand is why people think that ad comms can’t count or do basic math. If you are claiming 90 hours of EC’s each week, no one is buying that for a second.
I too, would like to know where cheating stops. In my state college there are cheating rings among the international students, I know personally of a Chinese student group that does this. I am fairly certain too that a lot of colleges ignore this in light of their full pay status.
They cheat to get in, they cheat when they get in and they dawdle about in their job placements making employers think twice about hiring from that alma mater again. It hurts other int. students who are honest, it hurts other students in the college and it hurts the universities reputation in the hiring process.

34

One thought I had about this is that it isn’t just the student involved in this. The parents are likely to be paying the cost of college, so would possibly be in on the scheme in some sense. I would think they may wonder how a student who doesn’t have the level of grades/scores as admitted applicants gets into a school like MIT.

Although the “friend” is responsible for his/her actions, and legally would pay the price for it, I wonder what is going on with the parents. Are they encouraging it, or unaware of it. If they are in on it, then they too, are taking on at least morally, the fraud.

If college is considered a place for the best cheaters, then that’s all a diploma would mean to that person.

It can only mean achievement to the person who got in, and did the work fairly.

35

I do think that is often at the behest of parents yet at the expense of applicants. Given the measures taken to make the audio line up with her playing and the careful angle of the camera I would say her parents had something to do with it. Her dad is a video/media editor for his profession so I’m going to say he was at the very least aware of it and at the most downright did it himself.
I have Chinese friends in college whose parents literally insisted they come to the US for school. It’s often at the expense of their kids happiness and education. Even cheating out of pure desperation, they still find it difficult to keep up. No matter how syndicated a cheating ring is, there is always the doubt.

36

This kids needs to have the whistle blown.

But sometimes, I will grant that “forgery” is acceptable, just to get things moving along. In my HS, latter part of last century, a kid applied to a school in TX from out of state. The actual transcript sent my the HS was considered suspect by the college, but it was genuine. Something about the school seal and how it was applied made them reject it. Multiple conversations between my HS and college could not straighten it out. So out of sheer frustration and a bit of humor, the kid’s dad pulled out the family heirloom - and old Texas Ranger seal. He embossed the transcript and sent it in. The school called to follow up - not to reject everything - but to verify the seal was from the students family. Once that was straightened out, an acceptance followed.

Strange but true.

37

On the matter of exaggeration vs. lying:

I believe a lot of students exaggerate on their applications, sometimes without even knowing they’re doing it. Confirmation bias is present in 99.9% of the human race, and high school seniors are no exception. If someone lists a sport (say, basketball) and writes that he/she was a “key player on the school basketball team,” then it may be that it’s what many would consider an exaggeration for someone who averaged 4-5 points a game.

However, it’s also easy to understand how a kid can see him/herself as a key player (without believing he/she is a good player). Most people will remember the stuff they taught the underclassman just placed on the team. Or the way their teammates asked them for advice on tactics before a given game. Or the fact that they’ve rarely missed a practice in 3 years. There’s no reason for them to have any recollection of the 14th time during their senior season that everyone looked to the point guard for advice rather than them, or the second of four practices they did miss, or the 38th time the coach had a chance to put them in a game and went with someone else.

So it’s possible to exaggerate without meaning to.

It’s also possible for kids to make accomplishments sound more impressive than they are without lying. One of my ECs, for instance, is piano. I’ve never planned on listing it on my college application, because to call my piano playing music is a stretch (saying it sounds like a cat being dragged through a gutter would be insulting…to the cat). Even so, I could, in all honesty, write that I’ve “played piano for 10+ years” and admissions officers would make certain assumptions about my level that, though I doubt they’d see me as bound for Carnegie Hall, would be overoptimistic. That’s not a lie. It’s just misleading.

My personal view is that many top schools have so many applications to sift through that any valid excuse for a rejection helps them sift through their 35,000 prospective students, making dishonesty very risky. Others may say, since their odds are only 1 in 20 anyway, why not take a chance in order to increase them?

I feel it’s important to understand why some kids may write apparently misleading descriptions of their ECs, whether inadvertently (as in my first example) or knowingly (as in the second). And of course there are examples like that given at this thread’s start, which are blatantly wrong. I personally believe such students are making a mistake, for the reasons I outlined in my previous post, but I try not to get in the habit of judging others. They’re the ones who have to live with the decision’s risks, with the consequences, and with themselves.

38

My theory is that people who ask this question are just idly considering whether they could get away with it, or suspect (without proof) that somebody else is doing it. People who really cheat in this way aren’t likely to ask advice about it here, or to tell “friends” about it.

As far as lying vs. exaggerating vs. putting your best foot forward, I think it’s hard to draw a clear line. I’ve read questions like, “If I was the co-president of the club, can I say that I was president of the club?” Well…I probably wouldn’t, but it’s debatable. Can I list something as a hobby if I’ve only done it a few times? Well…The key here is to remind yourself that your integrity is more important than making the best possible impression.

39

So true, although I don’t understand any of the arguments supporting a don’t snitch mentality.

I don’t know about other colleges, but it a violation of Stanford’s Honor Code to NOT report someone for cheating.

40

Some colleges now claim to randomly verify certain information on people’s applications, most likely by contacting a person in charge the EC in question. They obviously don’t have the time or resources to verify every EC on every application, but the ones that seem suspicious or inconsistent would be most likely. This means a student would have to engage in corruption with a teacher or administrator at a school to pull this off, and this can put an entire school’s reputation at risk as mentioned before. And besides, as mentioned the faked ECs that would probably have a significant impact on a student’s admission are also the ones that can easily be verified.

This type of corruption/collusion is probably more common from international applicants, who often have back-up school plans in their home country if the US ones fall out so they may not be worried so much about getting caught cheating, not to mention many international HSs have little or no track records with US schools and information is often more difficult to verify. For this reason most universities just focus on the SAT more than HS grades for international applicants. And since most schools don’t give international applicants financial aid, they tend to be wealthy full paying students so the university may not even care that much as long as they get a good percentage of them for generating revenue.

Also, the technical security standards for undergrad admissions could be increased in many ways to more parallel the higher security standards currently used in the application process to competitive graduate and professional school programs (where people have much more invested at that point and the stakes are lot higher, and thus people are willing to go to more desperate measures to cheat). For example, for medical school admissions in the US your college transcript has to be sent directly by the college and can never have been marked as “issued to student” and a repeat final transcript is required after getting admitted, and many have special watermarked paper to verify authenticity, not to mention that all your core pre-med prerequisites usually have to be taken in a US or Canadian university. The MCAT is taken at commercial testing centers where you have to go through a wand/metal detector and get fingerprinted each time to get into the test room, and there are security cameras watching the entire test room. This makes it much harder to hire someone to take the exam for you (which is common for the SAT since all that’s needed to get in is a photo ID). All your reported ECs require listing a contact person and number, and ones that draw suspicion (for example you list 3 years of research in a lab but there was no rec letter from the PI, and publications that cannot be found by an internet search) would probably trigger a rejection since there are so many times more applicants than spots. This doesn’t mean a student couldn’t have cheated all the way through college on their exams or picked mostly easy-grading professors to get their GPAs up, and hence the reason most medical schools now like to focus on the MCAT (despite all the weaknesses people claim that standardized tests have) since it’s nearly impossible to cheat on it and you’re not going to do well without knowing the material. Undergraduate admissions should adopt many of these stricter policies as well and focus more on these objective measures.