Colleges have rescinded degrees based on admissions or academic fraud, so even if a delay allows a student to graduate, that does not mean that the student is free and clear.
It is possible that a college may be trying to sort out between:
Students who knew about the admissions fraud on their behalf.
Students who did not know about the admissions fraud on their behalf.
Students who did not know about the admissions fraud on their behalf, but would have been admitted anyway (yes, some people cheat even when they could have gotten the desired thing honestly).
Students who may have been involved with the various actors but were not affected by admissions fraud (e.g. as legitimate athletes under the coaches in question).
@aurora2016 his spot was for an athlete… that’s his hook… they will accept a range of SAT with lower for hooks (athletes, nationalities they want, alumni kids, diversity which includes race, state, or income)
@airway1 sounds like you support athletic recruitment as a hook for kids with significantly lower SAT and GPAs than required for most athletes…UNC Chapel Hill style
@Sue22 , I usually agree with you, but if the student did do all the work required while in college, it seems unfair to revoke a degree. Remember that most students are still very young and naïve when they fill out their common app. We would all be hard pressed to find an app that doesn’t have some fudging on it, mostly harmless. Many kids overestimate volunteer hours and the like. The punishment should fit the crime, so if the student as an applicant was being dishonest at the urging of a parent or advisor, it’s hard to think of consequences in a few years time as a young adult.
There are a lot of ideas here about how to curtail the admissions cheating, but the common denominator in all of this is the abuse of wealth. The best way to stop rich people from buying their way in is to take away their money. Oh sure, leave them a few bucks for some food and shelter but that’s it.
@PurpleTitan 100% agree. American is just very good at PR and marketing. It disguises corruption and classism by selling itself as a democracy. We are no different than any other country when it comes to our share of cheaters
There is nothing at all that prevents a parent – or other person – from submitting the application online without the student ever seeing it. It can even happen with the student believing they have written their own essays – that is, the student gives the parent (or college consultant) the essays typed out in MS Word – with the expectation that the parent is going to fill in all the online stuff for them, using their work. So those students are never seeing whatever the final piece is in the online form.
And as the offspring of wealthy, celebrity parents these kids may have grown up in an environment where all sorts of tasks are handled by others – It’s a world of housekeepers and personal chefs and personal assistants… so for them, why wouldn’t it make sense for mom to arrange for one of her people to take care of the tedious task of filling out the online form?
I’ll bet that a lot of helicopter parents are doing that anyway (without falsifying), under the rationale that their students are too busy, or that they are only “helping” by serving a secretarial function … or just because they are afraid that if they don’t do it their kid won’t get it done in time.
It is quite clear that some parents went to great lengths to conceal this from their children. With the wealth involved, they hired their own psychologists, some of whom seemed quite willing to give them the label and sign whatever.
Isn’t it possible, and even likely, that these parents - who paid for others to take an online class for their kid - also paid someone else to meet with the shrink? The doctor doesn’t ask for ID for a kid - so the doctor has plausible deniability, unless he recognizes the same kid now has a different name. If the parents were willing to go to these great lengths to hide this from their kid, isn’t it believeable that they’d take another step along the way?
The whole process is new to the kid - many of them actually took the test themselves and had no idea that their scores were someone else’s test, a crooked proctor with extra time can do whatever was necessary to guarantee a 32 on the ACT
"@TatinG this level of bribery and special admits for the wealthy and celebrities is widespread at elite schools (either that or the 1% has a monopoly on genius status) and has been for decades. "
Wrong. The indictments have an interesting tete a tete about this.
Singer tells someone that you can get in through the front door (regular way) or through the back door – which is development admission cases. But he points out two problems with the back door.
First, the schools will never give you an actual guarantee of admission, no matter how much the parents give. These parents wanted the spot locked in before writing the check. Second, the back door at these schools costs 7 figures – 10X more than what he was charging.
These semi-high rollers were trying to get by on the cheap. They were willing to pay $500k, but not $5 million. Hence the less expensive solution Singer was selling – the five figure “side doors” that he created that were based on bribes and fraud.
I have zero problem if Harvard or Yale or Gtown want to sell a few seats each year for 7 figures and are transparent about it. You can pay for a lot of Pell kids with that dough.
@LisaNCState- "Stop this extra time nonsense and if it’s a valid reason then get a certificate from a school and make school sign “no cheating involved” certificate punishable by law and see how many fake kids gets dropped out… this accommodation is rediculous. "
“My point is if the majority of the kids are doing in the time allocated then why give an extra time? (my sympathy to accommodation kids however they should not be going to competitive school”
Ridiculous is not spelled “rediculous” and your sentence structure in several instances is flawed. I know you will dismiss it as nonsense (irony intended) but you may want to get checked for dyslexia. Your comments regarding the potential of “accomodations kids” are incredibly misplaced, uninformed and hurtful. Many kids with attention issues thrive in competitive schools.
@TheBigChef If college administrators cannot verify and be responsible for the integrity of their coaches and the validity of athletes and their careers, then it’s time to spin off athletics into a separate division of the college. USC and USC Athletics. Let them accept athletes with academic credentials separate from the academic institutions. That way the greedy crimes of the coaches and fake profiles of recruited athletes don’t taint the academic institution whose students were admitted based on merit only
The problem is that the tests are designed (and normed) around the assumption that most people won’t have enough time. That’s an underlying flaw in the whole notion of using standardized tests – but as soon as they give extra time for everyone, then they have to redesign & re-norm the tests. (Not that the test norming could be in any way scientifically valid in an environment where the test-taking conditions vary among different individuals – but again, that’s a systematic, across-the-board flaw in the whole testing system)