When Foul is Fair: Cheating, Fraud, Testing and More

How do college admissions officers attempt to detect forged or fraudulent application materials?

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I was asked to answer the question above on the website Quora.com 

I wish I could say I knew all the answers but I can talk about a few.

First of all, credentials come in many shapes and sizes but the one document that is required for entry into virtually any school is a transcript. Generally speaking, there is not a lot of fraud when it comes to students submitting transcripts form secondary schools or colleges and universities in the US. The technology is now in place that many secondary schools can send transcripts electronically directly to the school so unless a student has hacked the school’s system there is very little chance that the transcript is not accurate. Colleges and universities send official transcripts and they come with seals, stamps, and other things that make it difficult to forge.

I wish I could say that the same level of security was in place in other places around the globe, but this is simply not true. The country that gets the most scrutiny is China but there are other places too. Some admission offices have staff members who have been trained to spot fraudulent transcripts. These people have usually attended workshops hosted by experts who give lots of good tips about things to look out for. On the other hand, some schools would rather not take the time and effort to scrutinize each transcript for its authenticity. What these schools do is outsource the evaluation and verification. The mostly widely know service that does this is WES (World Education Services). They have been around for a long time and have the brand recognition of providing accurate assessments and verification.

The largest number of international students, by far, comes from China (235,000 was the number of undergrads last year). I mention this since China is also the place where the submission of fraudulent documents and cheating on tests goes on at rates that are alarming high. In the past couple of weeks there have been several stories that have made some headlines and raised these issues to a broader community in and out of education.  

The biggest story right now has to do with testing. In October, the SAT was administered in a number of locations across the world. Shortly thereafter came reports that some of the students had access to questions prior to the test. As a result, the ETS (The Educational Testing Service)) took action. Here is what the NY Times Reports: “Responding to cheating allegations, the company that administers the SAT tests around the world is withholding scores, at least temporarily, for thousands of Chinese and South Korean students just days before the early application deadlines for most American colleges and universities.” 

Here is where things get complicated in a number of ways that will make the assessment of students from these places a challenge for colleges and universities. Most students who apply to university in the US from these countries do test prep of some sort. Given that China, Korea and India make up about half of all international undergrads in the US, it should come as no surprise that test prep is a huge business in these places. The test prep in China and Korea have the reputation of preparing students to do very well on the tests. They deserve this reputation. In my experience of evaluating applications and talking with students from these countries I’ve seen great scores again and again. (The average score for applicants from China to a selective university in one year I have data for is about 2130). But these scores are not in most cases the result of cheating. Students spend a lot of money and a huge amount of time preparing for these tests. In some cases test prep companies run summer camps in which students spend many weeks working 12 hours a day on test prep. Research shows that putting in great amounts of time and effort on test prep works to increase scores, often dramatically.

The test companies, have, in addition, done a lot of deep data work. One way they do this is to get students who are taking ‘real’ tests is to ask each individual student to memorize several SAT questions and then to share the question with the test prep company immediately after the test. Given the hundreds of students they have doing this, the test prep company then has a full and accurate copy of the test as soon as it has been given. While ETS does release some old tests as study guides they withhold some of the old tests too. What has now come to light is that ETS recycles old test questions that have not been released. (I was interviewed about this issue a week ago by Time Magazine, but the article focuses more on how ETS prevents cheating than on the issue I raise in my comments there about old test questions being recycled, but it’s clear that old test questions are used.   In a subsequent article posted by Time, my friend Hamilton Gregg, who is  veteran counselor who works in China,  talks in more detail about the issue and how significant it is: "Nevertheless, Gregg is incensed by the latest scandal. “Someone is so selfish that they put tens of thousands of students’ futures in jeopardy,” he says."

I mention this because immediately after the October test I was contacted by someone in China who told me that students were reporting to my contact that the questions on this test were ones they had already seen. What is important to note is that the students themselves were unaware that the test questions would be asked again. It may be that the test prep companies knew this but at least from the students I have heard from, they were not aware this would happen. All of which brings up several big questions. Should the scores of these students be withheld and eventually discarded? Thousands of students are having their scores withheld at the moment. Secondly, are these students guilty of cheating? If so, in what way? And perhaps most importantly, is there any way ETS can distinguish between those who had access to prior test questions and those who did not? It may well be that every score from Chinese and Korean students from this test date may be interpreted by admission offices as tainted, even if they are released. And it may be that admission officers may have doubts about any other testing too. The minds of admission officers have now been primed (in the cognitive science sense) to interpret students from these countries as dishonest and this will affect how readers will rate them.

While ETS’s decision to recycle test questions opened the door for some of this testing mess, I also need to make it clear the blame rests largely with students, parents, schools and businesses from these countries, especially China. Diane Ravitch, a nationally prominent educator, challenges some of the assumptions about the greatness of the Chinese schools and education system in the most recent issue of The New York Review of Books. She provides quotes about the culture of cheating that goes on there: “China has a problem, however, that is seldom discussed: cheating and fraud… Zhao describes the lengths to which students go to get high scores. Many of the courses they take are specifically geared for test preparation, not learning. Schools exist to prepare for the tests: Teachers guess possible [test] items, companies sell answers and wireless cheating devices to students, and students engage in all sorts of elaborate cheating. In 2013, a riot broke out because a group of students in Hubei Province were stopped from executing the cheating scheme their parents purchased to ease their college entrance exam. The British newspaper The Daily Telegraph reported that an angry mob of two thousand people smashed cars and chanted, “We want fairness. There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat.” 

Ravitch’s comment about the culture of cheating being rarely discussed demonstrates she does not really know much about education in China. Her comments about rote learning being the way all students learn to do well on tests demonstrates she has not spent time in some of top ranked secondary schools there as they teach students to do far more than take tests. Nevertheless, she points about cheating are worth quoting here.

But things get even more complicated in China.  The grades that students earn in Chinese high schools are often much lower than grades given in the US. Schools use low grades to motivate the students. However, schools in China have learned that sending transcripts with low grades to selective US schools virtually assures the student will not be offered admission. As a result, there are many schools in China that have what they call an American transcript. The transcript is sent by the school and is therefore official, but the transcript is almost always filled with all A’s. The schools (and some of these are the top magnet schools in China) feel that a lower grade in China should be increased to reflect the grade inflation in the US. This practice of changing grades raises questions. If the schools themselves change the transcripts is this then fraud? Schools in the US weight grades for many classes but weighted grades are not a part of the education system in China. US admission officers at selective schools rarely ever see a grade of C on any US transcript these days, even one C can sometimes be enough to keep a student out of contention. In China a C can actually be what it is supposed to be-- an average grade that many students get. In the US these days, A’s are the average grade at many schools. Are the officials in China wrong to change the transcripts? 

But I am not done. Most selective schools in the US require recommendations, sometimes as many as 3. In China, teachers do not write recommendations. Selection to university there consists of a single score on a single test, the Gaokao, so they do not see it as their job to write recommendations for US schools. In addition, many of the teachers do not want their top students to go abroad. It isn’t that they are anti American. Instead, secondary schools are ranked based upon their placement of students to top universities in China. If a number of top students from the school opt out of applying to top schools in China in order to go instead to the US, then it can then hurt the school’s ranking (and this will have a ripple effect on salaries, job security etc.). Suffice it to say, that Chinese nationals who are teachers do not often write recommendations. So what is a student to do? In some cases, the student writes the recommendation and gets the teacher to sign it. At least in this case the teacher has seen the recommendation. Is a recommendation like this a fraudulent document? If the teacher agrees with what the student has written why would it be fraud? 

But most recommendations are, instead, manufactured from start to finish by the huge agent industry in China. Families pay tens of thousands of dollars to agents to package students’ applications. This includes creating recommendations out of thin air. What is sad is that many people in admission know about this practice but do not particularly care so long as the student has the money to pay full fees and the SAT and TEFL scores are high. Schools in the US need full payers and China is a great resource for this (I have written about this a number of times so won’t go into detail here). At the most selective colleges and universities, however, there is another trend taking place. Since there are so many irregularities going on with student applications applying from schools in China many are choosing to offer admission to Chinese student who have enrolled in schools outside China. I know number of Chinese students accepted at the top schools in the US and a disproportionate number of them have finished secondary school in Singapore, the UK, or the US. What this means is that in effect, colleges and universities are just not sure about so many parts of the application from student applying within China that they are not taking any risks. Many schools are now requiring or strongly encouraging interviews, either with alums or through a number of businesses that conduct interviews and send them to the schools (InitialView is one that has contracts with a number of great schools in the US).

If it appears that I’m giving China a particularly hard time, I am. There are many things going on over there that need to be addressed. But back in the US things are not always rosy either. At Stuyvesant High School, 70 students were caught cheating on the SAT a couple of years ago. Given that this is one of the best high schools in the US, it demonstrates how much students are willing to do to get accepted into elite schools. 

But there is more than just cheating on SATs going on all across the US and the world. There are many students getting essays written for them by ‘experts’ who charge anywhere from a couple hundred dollars to untold thousands. I have already written a long post on plagiarism (which I would group under fraudulent documents) so I won’t repeat what I have said there 

Finally, I should add that most admission officers do not spend much time at all trying to check for fraudulent documents. They are so busy trying to read applications that they don’t have time to check transcripts, recommendations, essays etc. The direct submission of documents via electronic transfer from schools in the US has cut down on some of the possible problems but this has yet to be implemented internationally. I have no doubt there are students walking around campuses, some of them with elite names, who submitted fraudulent material. But overall the number is I think small. It’s hard to manufacture things and even when they are most students don’t get into elite schools anyway. The current scandals have raised the issue and this means schools will be even more circumspect about documents particularly from certain countries. At the moment I think that many applicants from China (and Korea too) may have a harder time getting in this year, as there is so much negative buzz going on, but for the rest, I think, it’s not a big issue for most admission offices. Should it be?