<p>i know i'm not the only one wondering this. what would it take to get an offer of admission from harvard rescinded?</p>
<ol>
<li>a criminal offense.</li>
<li>an offense that puts your graduation from high school in jeopardy.</li>
<li>an unjust and significant drop in your grades that cannot be properly accounted for by your school.</li>
<li>blatant misrepresentation of facts in your Harvard application.</li>
<li>any new news that would cause Harvard to question seriously your morals, ethics, integrity, and meriting a place at Harvard College.</li>
</ol>
<p>Is there any point past which the admission (or the degree) cannot be rescinded?</p>
<p>-matriculation
-several semesters of enrollment
-graduation
-expiration of statute of limitations for civil fraud
-death of the applicant who committed the fraud</p>
<p>If you misrepresent your high school grades and then graduate with high honors, is it still an issue? </p>
<p>I suppose that Harvard, like any school, keeps a free hand to do whatever it wants, but I'm curious whether any past examples indicate the likely behavior.</p>
<p>Harvard says that if there is a misrepresentation in your application, and you receive a degree from them, and they discover it after the degree is awarded, they will rescind the degree.</p>
<p>with respect to my original reply on this conference, after considering it and receiving an interesting set of PM's, I take back number 5 because it's too general.</p>
<p>In sum, if you don't do anything intentionally stupid and keep working hard, your spot at Harvard will be reserved for you until your arrival.</p>
<p>Also, the conditions that I mentioned are not absolute ways to have your offer of admission rescinded. It is assumed that Harvard will consider all facts and make the most fair judgement possible.</p>
<p>I know you can't let your grades drop too much, but how about your AP scores? Do those even really matter?</p>
<p>colleges won't even get ap scores if you don't send them. regardless, at harvard, the only score that counts is a 5, so harvard isn't going to care if you got a 1 or a 4 on something. however, obviously since you are paying $83 for each test, it might not hurt to try your best regardless.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Harvard says that if there is a misrepresentation in your application, and you receive a degree from them, and they discover it after the degree is awarded, they will rescind the degree.
[/quote]
That's something some nasty jealous guy on CC made up to discourage lying. Do you know how much of a hassle and embarrassment it would cause the university to do such a thing?</p>
<p>No, I think it is really true that the university can rescind a degree. I don't hazard a guess about what grounds the university would decide justify rescinding a degree, but it could happen. A university will do this to protect its own reputation. </p>
<p>I know for sure that Harvard's record office takes great care to verify who is recognized as having a Harvard degree and who is not. As you can imagine, many impostors in many places falsely claim to have Harvard degrees, and thus many employers and other interested persons who check resumes have reason to contact Harvard to see if a particular person really has a degree from Harvard. I once was in an online forum in which a crazy guy had two imaginary twin sons who had just been admitted to Harvard that year, so he claimed. He would sometimes post in "their" names, so that he could act immaturely online without being chided for being an immature adult. A private message from another participant on that forum, a LONG time ago, mentioning her doubts that this guy's "sons" were real, was my first alert to how dishonest some people are in online forums.</p>
<p>Why do you think that some large international business would rather let corrupt officers resign in silence rather than trying them in court? Because it is easier to protect their reputation to do so than if the scandal were in the hands of the media. This is the same issue for any school such as harvard. I think that, as an institution built upon integrity and trust, Harvard will go to great lengths to attempt to cover it up.</p>
<p>Harvard can truthfully answer a legitimately interested inquirer by saying, "No, [name] did not graduate from Harvard College" without covering anything up. That helps rather than hurts Harvard's reputation. It's not Harvard's fault if people occasionally lie about their affiliation with Harvard. </p>
<p>Once you've recovered from the wine, think about this some more.</p>
<p>yeah what I wrote isn't fiction. it's in the Harvard viewbook. luckily it is a very rare case that Harvard has to resort to that, though.</p>
<p>I think you are misinterpreting the discussion at hand tokenadult... We are debating about whether a lie on a student's application before enrollment at the university could lead to his or her degree being appropriated by the university, NOT about whether or not the university will verify affiliation with a person</p>
<br>
<blockquote> <p>That's something some nasty jealous guy on CC made up to discourage lying.<<</p> </blockquote>
<br>
<p>Not true. Harvard states quite plainly that they will revoke already-awarded degrees from graduates who are later discovered to have lied on their applications. </p>
<p>Here is the link:</p>
<p>"Occasionally candidates for admission will make inaccurate statements or submit false material in connection with their application. In most cases, these misrepresentations are discovered during the admission process and the application is rejected. If a misrepresentation is discovered after a candidate is admitted, the offer of admission normally will be withdrawn. If a misrepresentation is discovered after a student has registered, the offer of admission normally will be revoked and the student will be required to leave the school. If the discovery occurs after a degree has been awarded, the degree normally will be rescinded."</p>
<p>Thanks, coureur, for finding the link to the Harvard statement.</p>
<p>I don't have to worry... :) because I'm not going to be accepted... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA....ehhhhhh</p>
<p>The link unfortunately contains no information; everything is hidden in the word "normally". Just about any university on the planet has some policy that it can/will/may revoke diplomas if lies are discovered in the applications, and for a variety of other reasons. The issue in Harvard's case is what usually happens when the university hears that something might be dubious in an application. Consider, e.g., the recent plagiarism case (Opal Mehta author) --- an enrolled student was not dismissed nor, as far as I know, suspended, despite compelling evidence of plagiarism. Unless the woman left it off her application that she was author of a bestseller, this would be an obvious case of misrepresentation on an application, and it made the newspapers. Nevertheless, apparently Harvard didn't feel compelled to act, or that the facts necessarily reached the threshold for dismissal.</p>
<p>Here is a more informative link. The other one was from the School of Public Health, not Harvard College per se, though the formal policies are probably the same everywhere. The current registrar (don't know how long he has held the job) says that he hasn't seen any cases of degree revocation, which he describes as an option "for the faculty", i.e. it would be a faculty committee and not a bunch of administrators who ultimately decide these issues.</p>
<p>^^From the linked article:</p>
<br>
<blockquote> <p>In 1995, the University revoked the admission of a Harvard admit after discovering that she had pled no contest to voluntary manslaughter after allegedly beating her mother to death with a lead candlestick five years earlier<<</p> </blockquote>
<br>
<p>A more recent and perhaps more relevant example is the revocation of the admission of Blair Hornstine - since that case was based on fraudulent admissions material rather than on bloody murder.</p>
<p>Re: the case of Gina Grant, whose admission was revoked. It was rescinded not because she had committed murder per se, but because she had not disclosed it in her application.<br>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gina_Grant%5B/url%5D">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gina_Grant</a></p>
<p>There was in fact a certain amount of sympathy in the high school for her, and she eventually attended Tufts.</p>