I find it hard to understand how some folks on this thread allocate blame for this fiasco. Singer was the cooperating witness, and to use our President’s terminology, “ratted” on the parents. Neither is without fault.
However, the scamming came from the incredible importance paid to standardized testing and the security issues the test agencies had. While there has been some talk on this thread that that universities were “victims”, I find that laughable in the extreme.
Everyone of these characters is culpable, and I hope that real reforms come out of all this.
In any event, I truly am repeating myself, so I don’t think it’s too long before this thread is locked. If and when it is, please never forget the key issues that arose out of this debacle and that were often brilliantly discussed in this thread. Here are my favs:
parents (like me) need to chill.
our kids need to understand from us that all we want for them is to do their best, not be the best.
where you go to school matters less than what you make of the infinite opportunities around you, whether that's at Harvard, Oxford, or Podunk Community College. Learn as much as you can where you are at.
the standardized tests are a joke. That Singer could use captive test centers to keep this fraud going for so many years says volumes as to how secure these tests really are. As mentioned before, the SSAT for high school admissions doesn't even require an id. Abuse of the real need for some for accommodations is another area that really needs to be looked at.
*all of these testing agencies really need to get real.
*the universities needs to audit their acceptances so that there is some check and balance as to the integrity of the decision-making process..
*universities need to be far more transparent. If a university is going to be keeping a large number of its class reserved for legacies, development donors etc, that's fine. Just tell the applicants this! After all, you are charging a fee for the application and giving a clear impression that admission is merit-based. That, universities, is where you may have legal exposure.
My last point has to do with CC. CC is a wonderful website, and I’ve never seen such activist moderators (and that’s a good thing!). Given how rapidly this thread has developed, the one recommendation that I would have for the moderators is to have a reply tied to a specific comment. While it’s ok to refer to a comment by @mynameiswhatever etc 40 posts ago, it’s very hard to follow the thread using the blog software that CC uses. Maybe I’m not using CC right, but it does seem that there have been a number of comments on this thread that the blog software needs to be updated.
Mods: Please consider something else! There’s hugely valuable info on many of your threads, but not being able to put a reply hierarchically below the main comment to which the reply addresses makes it hard to follow.
I am not a fan of the particular type of standardized testing now in use for college admissions, but as long as there is any kind of standardized test, I’m in support of electronic surveillance of every exam room. One pair of proctor eyes just cannot see everything and won’t be staring at students for 3.5 hours.
What may nauseate me even more than the shocking bribes and other forms of fraud are the suits by currently enrolled students and what they claim they “lost” on account of this.
Among the many troubling aspects of this scandal, the most troubling to me is the lack of transparency on the part of universities about what is really going on in their admissions processes.
In this sense, I agree with the class action lawsuit. Families are not only paying application fees but also devoting enormous other resources in the effort to gain admission for their children. These families have a right to know exactly how these admissions decisions are being made for every category of the admission pool so that the families can come to realistic assessments of the chances of admission for their children, as well as of the makeup of the student body at the universities their children will be attending.
Many universities are cultivating an image of meritocratic admissions that is at least partially misleading. It is true that many families know that there are development, legacy, athletic, URM, and possibly other special category admissions, not to mention the general qualification that admissions are “holistic” rather than being based strictly on academic merit. But no one knows what this really means in practice, or what percentage of the total spots are really available for their particular children. (For example, one article I read claimed that 40% of white students at Harvard are legacy or athletes. I don’t know if this number is accurate, but if it is then non-legacy, non-athlete white applicants’ chances may not be as good as their parents think they are.) No one knows how much ability to pay in full and other non-merit factors weigh in the decision process. And of course who knew that at least some spots are being sold under the table.
The fact that some of the universities are claiming that THEY are the victims is the real scandal. The universities themselves either knew or should have known what was happening in their own admissions processes, processes the universities are encouraging families to devote enormous resources to participate in. The universities owe families a complete accounting of what was and is happening in their admissions processes.
Since it is highly unlikely that the universities will render this accounting of their own accord, time for families to demand that legislators to step in with a Truth in Admissions law.
You must be thinking of Charles Murray. He went to Harvard from Iowa and later earned his doctorate from MIT.
Standardized testing worked too well. That is the reason for modifying them again and again. They affect the transmission of privilege from generation to generation. I suspect the idea is to make them irrelevant so they can be phased out all together. It was a much more “innocent” time when they came up with the SAT.
I agree that the SAT has been progressively modified to make it less meritocratic. The most blatant example of this was the 1995 recentering of the curve in which students received 100 points more in verbal overnight. This crowded the upper part of the curve, making it impossible for truly outstanding students to distinguish themselves from ones who were only very good.
Similarly, the 2016 elimination of the guessing penalty greatly raised the bottom of the curve. Consider the case of a pigeon that chooses the right answer by picking seeds out of one of four dishes. Prior to 2016, a pigeon would have scored approximately 0 raw points because the guessing penalty would have canceled out the raw points for the correct guesses, and the raw 0 would have converted to a scaled 200. But with the new SAT, a pigeon would score approximately 1/4 of the total raw points (fewer in math because of the grid-ins.) For example, out of a total of 52+44 verbal raw points, a pigeon would score 13 + 11 raw = 17 +16 scaled (Test 5 curve) = 330. While 330 is not a great score, that’s pretty good English verbal skills for a pigeon. The CB college-ready benchmark of 480 is only 6 questions in reading and 7 questions in writing better than a pigeon.
Similarly, for math we can assume our pigeon would get 1/4 of the 15+30=45 multiple choice questions right, or 11 raw points = 340 (Test 5 curve.)
MommyCoqui - post #2790 - thanks for brining the testing issue back and how it affects the majority of students, not this focus on the top 1%.
Also, as far as the talk about suicide, I hope these students are getting the support they need. I can’t imagine the stress.
So first at my kids school everyone has /wears an ID badge lanyard and they have to have it for all standardized testing. Didn’t know that wasn’t a thing.
Some say the parents could be victims? Maybe chance takers but not victims. It’s sorta like being a kid hiding in the bathroom after seeing movie 1 so he can walk into movie 2 without paying as a kid. You knew it was wrong but chances of getting caught was very low… Which then made it OK.
Paying him for his services as a college counselor and advice and test prep etc is one thing. Guaranteed admission to the college of your choice is another and everyone knows that it is not right.
Someone up thread mentioned the need for standardized testing in the US because of the wide differences in curriculum and grading in K-12 between states and even school to school. If we could fix this, maybe we wouldn’t need standardized but that seems even a longer way off than putting in safe guards to eliminate cheating.
With today’s technology, we should be able to do a better job in reducing cheating.
I also want to speak to legacy and donation. My kid didn’t even apply to our alma mater. She would have been third generation with an entire family on both sides being very active alumns, and my fil is a big donor. Everyone in the family continues to donate, volunteer, serve on boards, and committees. Would DD have been accepted? Who knows. She wouldn’t have applied ED so the legacy boost is lost. Regardless, it doesnt change that the rest of us had an amazing education there and we want to continue to give back. Our involvement is definitely not quid pro quo and I know lots of active alumni who feel the same way, even after their own kids were rejected.
And FWIW, pretty sure DD went into her official visit with a big strike against the school because she wanted her acceptances to be based on her own accomplishments. She said she would never really know at our alma mater.
This tread continues to move away from the cheating. Parents didn’t try to make donations to the schools where the money could have been used to better the environment for all students. They BRIBED coaches and paid people to cheat on standardized tests. Let’s figure out how to close those loop holes, and not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
On tax deductibility. 30 percent of adjusted gross income is the annual limit for deductions to a private foundation. With a max 5 year carry forward.
20mm gift. 2mm is agi. 600k per year in deductions. Over 5 years. 3m total deduction. Resulting in a possible 1mm at savings at highest bracket levels.
Spend 20mm to fund schoordhios in perpetuity to save 1mm in taxes. Please enough with the tax deduction scam claims. It’s a throwaway line that sounds good.
Would anyone spend 20mm to save a million or any variations on that theme?
@makemesmart Colleges have access to a huge database with information about virtually every high school in North America and which is expanding constantly with additions from around the world. Standardized tests may have been more necessary years ago but certainly aren’t essential today.
Yale women’s soccer coach Meredith pressured players to write his papers for the master’s degree he was pursuing at Ohio University while he was coaching for Yale. The team members reported this to the Athletics Department and Yale President Peter Salovey. There were allegedly numerous complaints that spanned many years. In response, a few interviews were conducted by the Human Resources Department but no action was taken against Meredith.
Transparency is the key to stop cheating and alleviate the concerns of many applicants and their families. We shouldn’t be shocked that there’s corruption in any opaque environment.
@ucbalumnus Not all Canadian universities require the SAT for U.S. applicants. As I’ve mentioned already, there is a large database of high school information that all admissions offices in North America have access to in making their decisions. This has been available for many years.
It’s patently false that “everyone” wants the Masserati and “no one wants to settle for the practical Camry education.” In fact, the vast majority of college students in America have no interest in applying to the very small handful of schools that CC posters obsess about. Rather, they happily matriculate to state flagships, other big public state universities, directionals, small religious or secular privates, and community colleges. Those chasing the “Masseratis” are a small percentage of total college bound students.
It’s important to remember that there is a WHOLE BIG WORLD outside of CC. CC parents and others like them are not “everyone.”
@Nrdsb4 You are 100 percent correct. And I couldn’t agree more.
My only caveat and suggestion is to ask for context within the larger thread we are in.
That is to say, that while my language was not precise, please grant a person a little leeway.
This a just a informal forum and I was informally referring to “all” of those who seem to be unhappy with the state of affairs. That’s the “everyone” I meant. In terms of this thread it feels like a majority.
And out of context as a stand-alone quote misdirects my intention.
I’m not really agreeing with the “parents were conned” angle. Yes you hire someone in good faith, but when they suggest a not-good-faith /immoral/outright criminal method to achieve your aims, you just say no. It’s really not that difficult.
The vast majority of HS students apply to local public colleges. That is true. But if you take a look at the top 5%, 10% of a HS class then you will see a larger percentage of them apply to selective colleges. This is clearly shown by Naviance scattergrams.