<p>Consolation, I agree with your son. I have mentioned on CC that I know a student who applied to the ivy league schools and other "top" schools, who has boasted about misrepresenting his ethnic origin on his applications, who has been punished several times recently by the HS for academic dishonesty in various forms. The kid was waitlisted by one ivy league school and accepted to a few "top tier" schools. Lying and cheating should not be rewarded. Sooner or later this kid and others like him will have to pay the piper.</p>
<p>Kudos to the teacher's strong ethics and academic integrity. After all, the teacher's reputation is on the line and a student who is capable of plagiarism so early on is a poor academic investment.</p>
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Please don't blame the kids, and teams of consultants you created. The golden prize we are told is Ivy League.
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Plagiarism and other forms of cheating are cardinal sins - and can't be chalked up to mere unbridled competition. Packaged apps. that include EC fudging and essay manipulations are sins of a different order these days. Dishonesty and cheating are all too rampant and too easily forgiven.</p>
<p>yeah, I only wish this boy's teachers had the courage to take a stand. One teacher actually told the boy if he found out who was doing something dishonest in a lab class, he was going to call each of the schools he applied to. Well, kid was caught and still nothing done. So, I congratulatate that teacher as well.</p>
<p>When do we talk about the Rich kids whose parents buy them in? Does anyone have the guts to discuss the dishonesty of the Adcoms and parents who figure out a deal. I am more interested in that discussion. Why is this accepted.
Speaking of unappreciated ADCOMs- boohoo. I'll bet there are plenty of personal goodies, favors, gifts, jobs offered to them or their children and accepted. How would you know? NO TRANSPARENCY! They are only human right? Like Judges, Senators, Congressmen etc. We discuss everything but this disturbing issue. Every year someone on this board knows a kid or two who gets in somewhere out of nowhere. We all know why in our hearts. What lesson does that teach?</p>
<p>"They are only human right? Like Judges, Senators, Congressmen etc."</p>
<p>I live in the Washington Metro area. There is no general concensus that Judges, Senators, and Congressmen are human among close observers with a scientific bent arounf here.</p>
<p>Thank goodness that universities do not sway to alumni pressure and "accept any alumni offspring who was not certified brain-dead and fill in the rest with a few ?bright kids!" as one Princeton alumnus so blithely put it. Most students fill out their apps in good faith - and not out of greed or lust to snag an Ivy or other elite acceptance - and are not affected by the stress and anxiety linked to the admissions process. Just the same, the admissions process is too often seen as a game to be won or lost - with an Ivy admit ticket being the win. To blame this on adcoms, who are on the front-line of the decision-making process seems to me hasty and ill-guided. Each institution has a bottom-line, guidelines etc. and yes while a certain number of slots do indeed go to qualified legacy, recruited athletes, and full-pay kids the halls of Ivy are decked with diversity these days. So, bottom-line - even if a legacy might enjoy a slightly greater chance of admission that in no way justifies deceit. Nobody likes being policed and it might even seem that students are being "blamed" but actually students are given quite a lot of slack. When it comes right down to it, in the sake of transparency, colleges and universities do have to send a stronger and clearer message to the effect that the end does not justify the means.</p>
<p>good point!! There was a thread that was on every ivy league forum on CC, but was thankfully quickly deleted. The poster was referring to "advice" from another site on how to get into the ivy league. I don't know if the original poster at this other site was joking or just deceitful. But lying about your ethnic origin was one of the tips. It is outrageous. Your last sentence says it all: "...the end does not justify the means."</p>
<p>Our son wrote about his teeth so I guess his essay was safe and had integral integrity, though maybe some colleges preferred applicants with the perfect Colgate smile.</p>
<p>Seriously, my son participated in only things he enjoyed in hs and frankly preferred performing in his own band, lifeguarding at the lake up the street, being active in our church, taking the SAT once senior year sans prep course, and hanging out with friends rather than cultivating the captivating college resume.</p>
<p>His feeling was that he only wanted to attend a college which wanted his as he really was.</p>
<p>"...the end does not justify the means."</p>
<p>Now there is something everybody says but nobody really believe, and even if they did believe it it probably isn't true.</p>
<p>Anyway the way I see it modern humans evolved in Africa so no American who claims to be African-American is being deceitful.</p>
<p>Then there is sex. Everybody these days seems to be confused about their gender. One of our elite LACs even has a dorm for the gender confused. That being the case I think it is pretty much a matter of whim what you put down for sex.</p>
<p>Then there is the fact that we stole half the west from Mexico so by rights I say any living in California or Arizona or New Mexico or Texas can fairly claim to be Hispanic. I mean it is not their fault that the border crossed them.</p>
<p>Then there is the whole differently enabled thing. I think pretty much everyone can fairly claim to be differently enabled as well. After all what would the opposite be? Samely Enabled? The same as who or what?</p>
<p>Right, we can all claim to be African American.</p>
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Now there is something everybody says but nobody really believes, and even if they did believe it it probably isn't true.
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</p>
<p>Well, of course that is sadly all too true and is precisely why there is a need for the Admissions Police in the first place, isn't it? If a student claims the right to lie and cheat to get in then a college, in turn, is implicitly morally justified to take that student to task. After all, the college certainly has the right to ask whether or not that student will make a good fit for them and be a "positive" contributor to the student body. Spaces for admission are admittedly tight and competition rife, and so the margin of error to decide to invest in one student over another is that much smaller. The stakes are high on both sides. If a student brazenly lies and cheats to win the game or "get in" then what kind of player will they be? </p>
<p>The end does not justify the means - unless the "end" gets you what you want- or what you think you want. Oh, well, that is what flies these days -blurred lines and all is fair in love and war. But, hey it does occur to me that quite a lot of folks believe it and act by it - because I do think most students are not out to cheat or deceive.</p>
<p>From the Harvard Crimson:
College Uses Web Plagiarism Checks
Admissions office catches a ‘handful’ of plagiarists each year with online programs</p>
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[quote]
As college applicants face escalating competition to get accepted to selective colleges, admissions offices—including Harvard’s—are increasingly using internet resources to catch plagiarism in application essays.</p>
<p>According to Dean of Admissions William R. Fitzsimmons ’67, the admissions committee tends to catch a “handful” of would-be plagiarists each year using electronic sources in addition to admissions officers’ judgment.</p>
<p>Occasionally, he said, attempts are “clearly obvious” to application reviewers, as when students copy college essay books word for word.</p>
<p>“There may well be instances that get by us every year. There’s no way to know for sure,” he said in a phone interview.</p>
<p>According to Fitzsimmons, students can, and a few likely do, purchase essays from various private sources. Electronic scanning sources cannot detect these works, since while they are not the students’ own, they are not technically unoriginal.</p>
<p>Fitzsimmons said that the College has been using online resources since they became available over a decade ago. But the admissions committee also depends, as it has since before these online resources became available, on admissions officers’ intuition.
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</p>
<p>
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This past fall, the instructors in Sociology 189, “Law and Social Movements,” used Turnitin.com to scan students’ work as part of a plagiarism-detection pilot program run by Harvard’s Instructional Computing Group (ICG). The nine-year-old Web site, which added an admissions-essay service in 2004, has screened 27,000 admissions essays and found 11 percent to contain at least one-quarter of un-original material, according to The Wall Street Journal.
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</p>
<p>asteriskea - don't take my word for it that the ends justify the means. Read Sandra O'Connors ruling in Grutter v. Bollinger. That case made the careers of the top administratirs and U of Michigan who all went on to even better and more lucrative positions at Ivy League schools amid the hzzas of their colleagues. The ruling let them continue to do what they had been doing as long as they pretended to do it "holistically".</p>
<p>The results of the ruling are probably good, but even O'Connor couldn't justify it on the basis of the constitution or the laws of the land. When 17 and 18 year old kids who are already among the most cynical creatures on the planet then hear colege administrators talk about honor codes and truth what do you think the reaction is going to be? </p>
<p>Grutter is just one example of truth twisting and word splitting these kids see given a pass by the same folks who want to hold them to an Honor Code. How many honorary degrees and how many commencements has Bill Clinton be the keynoter for since he left office? You have an honor code that forbids lying and then you give Bill an honorary degree? What is an 18 year old supposed to think?</p>
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truth twisting and word splitting these kids see given a pass by the same folks who want to hold them to an Honor Code.
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Thanks, you just proved my point in spades - and if I want truth twisting and word splitting when it comes to the Michigan decision, all I have to do is read John Fund - who, at least, mindfully constructs his arguments with the caveat 'if the premise is correct then...". Most college bound 18 year-olds have keenly developed the faculty for logical, critical thinking and can see through flawed logic - which is why most kids are honest and "play the game" - and the metaphor of "game" when it comes to college admissions is under the microscope these days - according to Hoyle.</p>
<p>I've been waiting for this article to be published for quite a while now, though I admit I hadn't given a thought about finding it (and the CC post bound to be about it) until just now.. Jon Weinbach even wrote a post here on CC (and even mentions CC in the article) asking for some feedback on the issue. He contacted me for my opinions and, ultimately, didn't mention anything I said. But that's okay, because I didn't think I had said anything exceptionally interesting, save for the fact that, my academic environment being as cutthroat as it is, I don't know anyone who DOESN'T cheat. Go figure. :D</p>
<p>
[quote]
Before mailing out acceptance and rejection letters over the past week, thousands of colleges and graduate schools conducted their usual reviews of test scores, transcripts and essays. But less publicly, admissions officers focused on something else: police databases, plagiarism checks and reports by private-investigators.</p>
<p>There's a new age of vigilance in academia. Spooked by incidents including guidance-counselor fraud in Los Angeles, blatant plagiarism at MIT and campus crime in North Carolina, colleges and graduate schools are shoring up their admissions process. In an era when applicants seek an edge with $500-an-hour "admissions consultants" and online essay-editing services, schools are using their own new methods to vet prospective students. Much like corporations that have been burned by CEO r</p>