U.S. Colleges Step Up Admissions Spot Checks After Scandal

"U.S. colleges are stepping up scrutiny of student applications, as universities deal with the fallout from a scandal that saw parents pay bribes and rig test scores to win places for their children.

As the admission season begins, Yale University, Bowdoin College and Pomona College are among those conducting spot checks or verifying some information on applications to find signs of cheating or embellishment, according to school officials.

American higher education was sent reeling by the so-called Varsity Blues case, which saw millions of dollars change hands as part of a network geared to cheat the college entry process. Some parents received sentences ranging from probation to six months in prison. Coaches, including those from Yale and Stanford, have pleaded guilty.

Admissions officers say that while they want to spot evidence of such wrongdoing in the future, they also want to quash more mundane embellishments." …

https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2019-11-20/u-s-colleges-step-up-admissions-spot-checks-after-scandal

Well, I’m all for this. Still, checking only one out of every 40-50 kids leaves a wide open door for cheaters and exaggerations.

It’ll put more emphasis on feeder schools with trusted GCs and more scrutiny on apps from places not normally heard from. Walls will get higher.

Seems like if they want bang for effort, they would verify obscure top level achievements that would produce at least some media presence (e.g. an obscure sport recruited athlete would have some evidence of claimed achievement on some web site somewhere).

It’s one of those things that is probably needed but would be quite labor intensive/expensive to truly validate data. Checking one out of 40-50 won’t have much of an impact on kids who fabricate data on 8-10 applications. Odds are it’s caught at none, maybe one. And I doubt the schools will share findings.

What schools are checking is not whether the coach is getting the best, most accomplished athlete but that the athlete is really an athlete. And that the coach is not taking a kickback.

I agree that all colleges should put out a disclaimer that they will take steps to verify some applicants’ accomplishments. They don’t have to say ALL applicants. Simply by stating that, I suspect a lot of apps will suddenly become a little more ordinary.

The scandal wouldn’t have happened if there wasn’t the inexplicable process, by international standards, of admitting students to our top institutions of higher learning based on their athletic ability.

Agree, this scandal is not about kids lying about accomplishments on the Intel science fair or academic olympiads, Singer knew those couldn’t be exploited and to his credit, he created a side door around athletics. When this first came out, a reporter on NPR said it was pretty ingenious on Singer’s part, he was way ahead of the colleges, similar to how cheaters are ahead of the testers at the Tour de France. Recall that he was caught because somebody ratted him out to get a better deal with the Feds. Then the Feds started tracking the ACT accommodations, among other things and then got him and then he ratted out his clients. Nobody, especially the colleges, were really on to what he was doing.

I think anything that encourages kids to be more honest is good. A 2-3% check rate may not catch much cheating but it’s going to scare a lot of kids into being more scrupulous.

When my daughter met with a coach for recruiting purposes and told the coach she was her team’s captain the coach asked how many captains the team had (answer-1). It was clear she’d encountered kids who claimed the title of captain when in reality the team had a half dozen co-captains.

I’ve always told kids on CC that there’s no point in fudging ECs and honors. If an activity or award is a big enough deal to make an actual difference in an applicant’s chances it going to be easy to verify.

What about ending the ability of the wealthy to buy private testing and unjustified testing accommodations? Many of those kids had private proctors who changed their SAT answers. That should not be allowed, period.

Somebody should also crack down on doctors who hand out diagnoses of learning disabilities to the kids from wealthy families like a newly minted MBAs handing out their business cards at a recruiting event. I am sorry, but “mommy and daddy make seven-figure salaries” is not a symptom of a learning disability.

I smell a cottage industry forming. Hey, colleges, I’m great at internet research! For a small fee…

Top institutions prefer to populate their campuses with a considerable number of athletes. I don’t see that changing. Obviously, the verification process will be more rigorous, but from the sounds of it, any investigation at all would be a major improvement.

Ha, yeah! I bet there are a lot of CC users who would be glad to do that!

Shouldn’t high schools be able to certify school-based activities? They must know who the track captain or newspaper editor is at the school.

Is UC (or at least UCB and UCLA) still random checking 20%?

To me, so many exaggerations are their own reveal. How some kid founded a NP or raised some huge $$$. Puffing up vol hours. Running the pie club, who cares? They don’t necessarily have an idea, in the first place, of what matters.

A GC can verify if a kid was captain. Lots of hs have more than one in a position, whether on a team or pres of stu govt.

"I am sorry, but “mommy and daddy make seven-figure salaries” is not a symptom of a learning disability. "

That’s pretty harsh, most kids are getting legitimate accommodations, ones they’ve been getting for a while in school, extra test time, distraction-free environment etc. And this type of thinking will make it harder for them.

In one of the varsity blues cases, the GC did contact a parent to inquire about the sports recruitment for a sport not offered at the school (maybe it was water polo) and the wealthy parent responded by threatening the GC and telling her to back off. Not sure that expensive schools want to antagonize donors.

My kid had a number of interesting and unusual activities outside school but he didn’t like to talk about them at school. I have video of Wolf Blitzer telling him in front of a group of about 500 people that he was impressed by what he had done to get the award he was presenting. No one at school knew he’d gotten the award. He had over 600 hours of community service, yet in the spring of senior year his advisor raised the issue of how he was going to get his 40 hours of required CS done.

Despite the fact that his teachers and most of his fellow students didn’t know, there was ample verification of all this on line. All you had to do was google his name and it would come up in some way.

In the Varsity Blues case it would have been easy for the school’s college counselor to shoot a message to the college that the activity in question was purportedly outside of school but that she could not independently verify it. Of course that would be easier if the colleges themselves were on the lookout for cheating and not simply taking the word of coaches that a kid was a recruit.

I can see why the Loughlin kids were positioned as coxswains. While the kids who do the actual rowing develop noticeable muscles a coxswain is typically lightweight and not particularly muscular. Of course their names should still have shown up in race notes.

I’m sure they do, but I’ve never heard a compelling reason for this beyond they’ve always done it this way. While Duke basketball may be a semi-professional team that generates revenue, what’s the justification for a small college to have 25 or more non-spectator sports.