Recently, there have been many reports of cheating scandals. This is concerning because it undermines the hard work of honest students. I’m wondering, are college admissions officers aware of these incidents, and can they even tell if a student cheated in their applications?
Thanks
IMO: Are they aware, sure.
Do they care? Questionable to likely not.
They are not police officers. It’s not their job to investigate if an applicant may have cheated somewhere, or sometime in their life. Now if an applicant was caught and there is some notation, then that is different.
Like most things in life, people who read and evaluate applications are told to make a determination on the merit of what is available.
They know and they care that there’s a ton of cheating going on in high schools, but there’s not much they can do about it. That’s on teachers and administrators. Colleges can only judge what’s in front of them. They don’t have the ability to dig behind the transcript.
You typically get admitted to college based on the entirety of your grades, standard test scores and references. Cheating on some of that will, many times, stand out as an inconsistency and will be flagged. AOs aren’t stupid.
For the three instances that you referenced, those are allegations. I would not expect any AO to take action about allegations seen on the internet. As others have said there are always cheating allegations, tests being stolen/leaked and the like.
I read apps and do typically google Regeneron ISEF and other top award winners, and allegations likely wouldn’t impact an app. OTOH, if a winner at that level were ultimately to lose their award I would expect there could be consequences at some schools, e.g., rescind admission, maybe even expel someone if it happened a year or two later (I would expect that would be highly variable across schools and depend on the nature of the situation.)
Oh, yeah. They’re aware, but not it’s entirety. They know that these things kind of happen, but if there are comments that a person has cheated, that’s pretty bad for them.
Note: Post edited by moderator.
TBH, I am not sure how much AOs broadly even know about these competitions, much less track these things closely. It’s relatively rare for us to hire someone from another office who really knows about the high level academic competitions; we usually have to train them up. That’s my only insight…my guess is at most schools this is highly and continently dependent upon individual AOs.
(We do track them closely and investigate all allegations of academic integrity violations, though obviously we don’t comment publicly on individual cases)