“^ Not at most schools, and then the applicant would have to explain graduating from HS in NY.”
Yes, not at all schools. But how about boarding schools? A boarding school has students from all over the places, say CA, TX, IL. Getting an address in North Dakota is rather trivial compared with sending kids all the way to NY with $$$. They do not need to explain to universities about why they are not going to graduate from a public HS in their home towns. If one looks at the rather high percentage of the students in elite universities being from boarding schools, this may occur more frequently than you think.
As a matter of fact, I personally know one family moved their application address from NJ to a rural state for their kid attending a boarding school in MA.
Speaking of cheating, a few years back we admitted an international student for our master in accounting program. He stated that he passed the CPA exam in his country and he provided a copy of his certificate. When he arrived, our accounting faculty members were shocked that he had no basic understanding of credit and debit (accounting 101).
The average excellent kid is still struggling to make sense of his own true record. It may sound easy to fudge a title, but it won’t tip anyone who doesn’t get what adcoms want to see, in the first place. And anything suspicious can be flagged. Some kids, eg, name roles in clubs that don’t even exist at their hs. Not hard to check whether that exists.
Yup, there’s a known issue with kids from certain countries exaggerating.
My son’s school has the same practice as #12 above and they meet with the kid and a parent to talk through things that are outside of school (so, unless mom is also willing to lie about outside service hours or a job, it would be hard to slip any sort of significant lie past the GC). Our GC would look at the Common App. after submission – changing it behind his back would result in disciplinary action.
More importantly, a kid will not be able to see the GC or teacher recommendations and if those contradict what is in the kid’s list, that will certain raise a red flag. For example, my son’s school has the somewhat odd policy of not having officers in any clubs or organizations (in recognition that those offices are more often signs of popularity and to discourage kids from forming clubs only so that they and their friends can be officers). There is student government with a president, vice president, and class reps and captains on athletic teams (which most schools don’t count as leadership), but nothing else. The school carefully explains the policy to colleges directly and in the GC rec. A kid from our school who claimed to be president of model U.N. or the math team would be immediately caught when the AO could see that no such office exists. Likewise, it would be odd if the kid claims to have a significant leadership position, but none of his recommendations mention it. It’s a big risk to lie about something that might actually have an impact and stupid to lie about something that won’t.
I do think schools look at sport captains as leadership. I know it was specifically mentioned at 2 admitted student days that we attended which were both top schools. They listed for the accepted class how many nat’l merit, eagle scouts, class pres, sport captains, etc.