Teacher Evaluations - How do they know it is actually your teacher?

<p>Just curious,
For online common applications, there does not seem to be a place for teachers to sign and verify their identity. How on earth does common app know that it is actually your teacher submitting the evaluation?</p>

<p>Seems dubious to me.</p>

<p>they don’t, you can just create an email and write your own rec. swag.</p>

<p>Crikey,that’s scary! I wonder how applicants are just filling out their TE themselves??</p>

<p>you never know if the college may randomly contact the school and verify that the teacher works there and get the contact info. you never know. plus, who the hell would do that? that is insane =D</p>

<p>There are loads of ways to be unethical with the common ap. Some are easy to check out and others harder. You can claim you are a URM, that your parents never went to college, that you are a legacy, that you are president of a club you only attend, that you have awards you don’t have or play instruments you don’t play, that you are planning to study whatever field they are desperate for students in, that you have had life experiences that you haven’t (fake essay anyone?). So yes, you can fake out the teacher recs too. </p>

<p>There are a few celebrated cases of total phonies who have applied and been admitted. They were caught. I imagine there are others who didn’t. But then you have to spend the rest of your life wondering if someone is going to check up on you. Don’t be one of these people: <a href="http://jobs./articles/2011/01/26/lying-to-get-a-job/%5B/url%5D">http://jobs./articles/2011/01/26/lying-to-get-a-job/</a></p>

<p>I’ve actually had to fire people who lied on their resumes. So sad. But lying is addictive.</p>

<p>When my son applied to college, he got a particularly glowing letter from one of his recommenders. The recommender received a letter thanking him for taking the time to write on my son’s behalf from one of the schools. If he hadn’t written the recommendation, presumably the school would have heard from him after getting their thank you letter!</p>

<p>WOW! I never thought about that…there is a total honor system going on here. So many ways to break it…so tempting…</p>

<p>Why is this particularly different from the olden days? Back in 1980, what actually prevented me from my own letter of recommendation on paper and signing my math teacher’s name to it?</p>

<p>It all comes down to your own conscious. Like M’s Mom said, it’s so easy to lie on college applications. With the number of applications that University’s get it would be impossible for them to verify all the information provided by each applicant. I doubt that they’re going to verify the information after already accepting an applicant. I’m not encouraging anyone to lie on college applications I’m just saying that it’s easy to do so. I imagine that the people who were caught provided some crazy EC or experience that had to be verified and then proved to be false.</p>

<p>For schools that place any importance on LORs…the admissions rep for your area is most likely very familiar with your school, and even with teachers within your school. They will likely have received letters written by teachers in support of many students, both this year and in the past. If the letter you 'create" doesn’t look / sound like the others? You’re toast.</p>

<p>Also, many schools send form letters to teachers to thank them for sending LORs. If a teacher should happen to get a thank you–for a LOR the she did not write–again, you are toast.</p>

<p>And if your LOR doesn’t seem to track with your GC’s Letter? Toast again.</p>

<p>Why not just ask a teacher that you have honestly impressed with your work, your work ethic, your creativity, etc… to write a real LOR for you?</p>

<p>Or is this just a new extension of the cheating culture?</p>

<p>Whatever wrong u do now by trampling over ur conscious, it’ll eventually come back to u and nip u in ur behind.
Karma’s the word they use for it.</p>

<p>Has somebody officially done away with the word “conscience”?</p>

<p>People keep almost–but not quite–using it.</p>

<p>Sent from my DROIDX using CC</p>

<p>My daughter’s school handled the submission of common app materials through Naviance. Perhaps there are other electronic record systems other schools use. It would have been difficult for her, perhaps impossible unless she were a determined hacker, to fake a teacher’s recommendation. </p>

<p>I have always been conscious of the importance of reminding my own child to be guided by her conscience.</p>

<p>Doesn’t every teacher now have an official email address associated with his or her school or school district? I would think that a gmail address or no email address would be an immediate red flag.</p>

<p>^It doesn’t cost that much to get your own domain for an email address.</p>

<p>Right, but you can’t get the domain that the high school already has.
Thankfully, the increasing use of Naviance to handle this will eliminate opportunities for fraud.</p>