jym626,
Yes, jaded. I am intimately familiar with a number of these companies, as I am in higher ed. I have seen the way they “package” students. One company has testimonials from the owner’s spouse, brother, and other family members.
Unfortunately fraud comes with the territory. It would be better for all of us if it didn’t, and on top of that if exaggeration weren’t encouraged purely from a cost/benefit analysis, where the risks of getting caught on a small lie and having an application tossed are smaller than the risks of being ignored for being unimpressive. Reality is that people really have a need to get ahead and some resort to particularly dubious methods to do so. Just an unfortunate side effect of having to differentiate yourself where there are far more qualified applicants than openings.
Cheaters will always find a justification to cheat. “Everyone cheats on their taxes.” “No one really contributes to the honor box.”“Everyone lies on their college applications.” It doesn’t make it true and it certainly doesn’t make it right. You are what you do, and yes, cheating does make you a bad person.
It’s always easy and non-controversial to take moral absolutes and not try to understand the underlying problem. Doesn’t make it right - it would be better to figure out why people lie on applications (or cheat on taxes) so we could prevent it. Saying, “they are just bad people and that’s the end of that” is a terrible and useless cop out because while it is a feel-good thing to say, it doesn’t really solve the underlying issue as I’m sure we’d like to do.
The underlying issue is that sometimes it’s sometimes easier to be dishonest than honest. It’s hardly a new problem. At least if you’re going to cheat have the cojones to cop to it instead of trying to justify it as being a somehow harmless sidestepping of the truth.
@NeoDymium, People cheat because they think they can get away with it. Other than colleges spending a lot more time and money working to catch applicants in fraudulent claims, what do you propose as a solution?
I completely agree with Sue. Trying to slice and dice and rationalize cheating is the useless cop out. You want to solve the underlying issue? Stop lying and cheating, and convincing yourself its ok. It doesn’t matter “why” people lie and cheat. Maybe they are ethically bankrupt. Maybe they convince themselves it is the system’s fault and this is what they must do to get ahead. Thats nonsense. Own it, and don’t do it.
Well, “The underlying issue is that sometimes it’s sometimes easier to be dishonest than honest.” is at least somewhat true. The more reasonable assessment is that “sometimes the system rewards dishonest behavior more than it rewards honesty.” That is something that could reasonably be addressed with good policy, though it is certainly against human (political) nature to behave in a way consistent with “truth above charming lies.” For the specific case of this OP, the issue has actually been rather well locked down; they only accept transcripts from the source and that’s the end of that. For more subtle issues, it’s an ongoing problem.
I have seen very little of anyone trying to say that cheating is a good thing. However, I have seen at least a few who pounce on that strawman when the real goal is to get a better understanding of the problem and to try to stop it from happening. Blaming the cheaters is feel-good, but not productive.
The system may “reward” dishonest behavior when the THINK/ASSUME the person is being honest. Time for me to wash my hands. The sliminess of some of these comments feels like it is permeating the keyboard. Justifying cheating because “we need to get a better understanding of the cause” is a serious copout.
I heard someone not long ago rationalize something they did that was blatantly unethical. They didn’t bat an eye. They justified it. Whats worse is that they then made some unreasonable demands of the person they were stabbing in the back. How do these people sleep at night?
We have created a system that, more often than not, rewards a great deal of moral and intellectual discrepancies. Lying about that EC, misrepresenting your race, not taking that arts class that will bring your GPA down, self reporting classes, looking over that test your friend already took, editing the crap out of that arts supplement. This all boils down to the message we are sending college bound youth everywhere. YOU are not good enough, try and be something else. Asian applicants trying to circumvent their own heritage, arts students being told that in order to be competitive they must take that science AP and that internship no matter how much they hate it, students choosing classes based on whether or not they are weighted rather than whether or not they are interested. Students realizing that they don’t have to understand the material they only have to memorize. Have them play 3 sports so they seem involved, they must do at least 3 clubs, have major academic awards and impeccable grades regardless of whether or not that means cheating on that exam or copying that essay. By the time we get to senior year we are already so intellectually smothered, so morally misguided, so ashamed of anything we truly enjoyed or any heritage we truly had and so inexplicably TIRED that when we fill out that app, honesty after four or more years of moral and intellectual bankruptcy is hardly on the forefront of our minds. At this point we have been drilled with the list of schools we must get into, what their mold is and which of our bones we need to break to fit into that mold. We are told that this is the sum of our worth, what school thinks that we are good enough for the mangled, broken picture we submit to them in the winter.
I don’t fit into that mold and I won’t. If being honest means I get rejected than I’m not the slightest bit interested in that school. I’m tired or seeing kids suffer in schools because everyone is telling them that their interests are not good enough, that their EC’s are not good enough and that the things they would most like to do are going to make them undesirable. I do what I want to do, I suppose that makes me a rebellious little brat but you know what? I’m a happy, intellectually stimulated, honest rebellious little brat.
Excellent, cowtown! Scruples Bravo!. Very nice to see. The other, well its like putting lipstick on a pig, IMO. This isn’t just about lying/cheating for college admissions, its a broadbased issue of the attempt to justify immoral behavior in many arenas.
That’s fair, and I’d say I did something similar myself. Thankfully in my case it was beneficial to do so. For those for whom playing that game is a necessity, I see why they have to do things the way they do. Med school is one of the biggest offenders in this regard, if you want examples where the outcome matters more that in UG Ivy admissions.
The end does NOT justify the means, if the means involves lying or cheating. How much clearer can this be?
Sometimes simplistic armchair ethics don’t reflect the reality of how the world works. Isn’t that a bummer?
Ironically, (and this is a true story-hand to God) I wrote a letter of recommendation for a kid the central theme of which was his good character. One of the anecdotes I told was about how he tried out for the golf team and was beaten out for a spot on varsity by a couple of kids who cheated by pairing up to misreport each other’s scores. He and my son, with whom these kids were in a foursome, chose to report accurate scores. My son scored low enough to get a spot, the other boy just barely missed it. He didn’t whine about life being unfair, didn’t demand a spot on varsity. He just became a quiet leader on JV.
This kid applied ED to my alma mater but was deferred. When I heard that I wrote a letter on his behalf. He had the scores, grades and EC’s but I like to think my letter had something to do with his application being pulled out of the large pile of admissible applicants and put into the much smaller pile of those offered a place at the school in the RD round. Which kid would you rather admit-a marginally better golfer or one who’s shown evidence of the character to resist the temptation to cheat even when it would be easy and work to his advantage?
@NeoDymium people lie and cheat on applications for the same reason people lie or cheat on anything: sometimes it’s easier to be dishonest and immoral. The right thing is not always the easiest thing, that’s how the world works. Just because the system makes it even easier and very tempting does not change the fact that cheating is morally wrong. And the system is not responsible for incentivizing people to do the morally right thing. If you have a moral compass that you follow, you should be able to do that yourself. And if you’re not going to do that, accept the fact that that is immoral behavior rather than trying to justify it by blaming the system.
Ethics aren’t "armchair, ", neodynium. You either have them our you don’t. Read post #75. Then read it again.
I’m pretty certain you don’t have any more productive responses in you, so this is the last time I’ll reply to you at all.
However, I will address @lalalemma , perhaps as a way to clarify and better describe my point. I don’t think that I disagree with much of what anyone here believes (except one rather vocal low-content poster), I think we simply have different criteria for what is and isn’t “lying” and “exaggerating.”
Sure, that’s a lot of it, and I would agree that it’s an open-and-shut dishonesty case for anything as egregious as what was considered in the OP. I suppose a decent cutoff for reasonable vs. unreasonable statements would be something along the lines of: is it a factor that is strongly related to whether or not you’d be a good admit, or is it a triviality that is more related to catering to to-the-letter requirements of being admitted than to your ability to perform as a student? When there are significantly more qualified individuals than there are openings for them, chance and arbitrary criteria start to play an increasingly large role. It’s pretty clear, for example, that there is a lot of “social engineering” at play in admissions that really has nothing to do with actual merit but with other factors, e.g. likely donors (“legacy”), URMs (good PR), X% Midwest, Y% Deep South, Z% International, etc. (a lot does indicate that such quotas do exist), and a certain number of “super A+ leader community pillar with at least two Nobel prizes” students.
Often, a resume or an application form with strict criteria doesn’t really give any chance for nuance. A resume doesn’t give much chance because it’s a quick “read and discard any that don’t appear perfect at first glance” document, and an application always has only very specific choices to choose from that rarely allow for any “90% truths” of any form. And since it’s early in the admissions process, these factors have a very disproportionate chance of getting your application tossed. In that light, I see nothing wrong with stretching the truth in small and harmless ways to be able to reach a point where you get a chance to clarify yourself to a person who will actually consider what you have to say when you are given an essay or interview. And if it happens to never come up, then that factor was not important.
A few examples would probably be fair. Is it fine to say that you are Hispanic if you have one Hispanic grandparent? I think so, since it’s very disproportionately relevant to admissions but not to merit, and it’s not a lie. Is it fair to report your grades as higher than they actually are? No, as grades are a factor that play a very important role in determining whether or not you are actually qualified, and it’s about as objective a criteria as you can have. Is it fine to say that you have 3 years of leadership experience (if, say, that that is the bare minimum for being “qualified” as a candidate) when you are two months short of that? Sure, seems like an arbitrary criteria to me. Is it wrong to say you did something you never did? Yes, as you are being evaluated on the assumption that you were involved where you said you were. Is it reasonable to say you are “very good” at a skill where someone else might describe you as “good” or say you were “very important” on a project when someone might think you were “moderately important” in your contributions? Certainly, since that’s an opinion, but that’s why LORs and essays exist - because it’s important to justify subjective criteria. Is it reasonable to lie or give false documents for essays and LORs? No, because that is fraud in the simplest sense.
Sure, there is a moral element to it. However, my point there was that there were two questions to ask. Namely, “what is permissible?” and “what should admissions committees do to properly weed out people who really do not belong?” And the latter most certainly is exactly what admissions committees are supposed to do. It’s important to realize that, left to their own devices, a fair number of people will cheat, even those with good intentions who simply feel that being fully truthful is an instantaneous path to being rejected without consideration (and they’re not always wrong). It’s a sad fact of human nature that every time you have to explain the answer to, “why don’t you meet arbitrary criteria Alpha or arbitrary requirement Beta?”, you look progressively worse and have less of a chance to prove that you are actually good and qualified. And in some cases, frankly, there are more important things in the world than satisfying arbitrary requirements that exist for no other reason than to filter people out due to flavor-of-the-day criteria and make the application pile smaller. Sometimes the right answer is simply not to play the game (cowtownbrown advocated this in a way), and when you can actually do so without it being strongly to your detriment, that might not be a bad idea. If, however, arbitrary criteria with no relation to merit stand between you and your goals, it’s hard to have much respect for them.
What should be done about this? First of all, measures should be put in place to catch the bad-faith cheaters who just want to game the system. Though imperfect, LORs, essays, and direct-from-source reports of official documents help to accomplish this task. Second, the application should be devised in a way that actual merit, rather than arbitrary criteria, determine who gets in and who doesn’t. That’s tough and often against human nature, and it’s a work in progress for sure. For what it’s worth, colleges are better at it than employers and most government agencies (e.g. immigration with quotas), but improvements could still be made. It is unfortunately not always to their benefit to do so, as they benefit from all this PR.
Excellent news. Greatly appreciated, since the responses have been the continued spin of the same morally flawed argument.
The examples you gave above are examples of semantics, or perhaps embellishments, which differ from the previous examples of more blatant deception and dishonesty. A person thinks that their role was “important”, or “vital” or “key” in some activity. Well, hopefully a LOR will support it. But if they said they led something, or initiated, or organized, or ran something when they did not, that is a lie. No matter how you wish to spin it. Agree that there should be better systems in place to catch blatant dishonesty and purposeful deception. Photos on every application so some caucasian from Capetown who moved to the US doesn’t select “African -American”, perhaps a list of clubs noting those in leadership positions from the schools along with their school profile (though these roles change and there are certainly problems with this, but just musing for sake of discussion). But to try to say until we can get to the root of the problem we have to just accept that cheaters will take every opportunity to game the system is sad, and pathetic at best.
Imac,
Re an earlier post a few pages back: Maybe some “package” students but most (not talking about the ridiculous $40k ones), are ethical and do not. Please do not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Which website has testimonials from immediate family members? That should be pretty transparent.