Everyone who has gone to college or grad school knows that you can get in trouble for cheating on a test or plagiarizing a paper (especially grad school).
What happens if you lie, forge, or cheat your way INTO school, and get caught later?
E.g.
John Smith forges his high school transcript to increase his GPA from 2.6 to 3.2. He gains admission to State U on these credentials. He finds, after arriving at school, that school isn’t as hard as he thought it would be and doesn’t find any occasion to cheat. In his senior year, the school does an audit of admissions records and discovers the transcript discrepancy. What could happen to John, assuming that he can’t be proven to have cheated in any of his classes at State?
I’m interested in cases where this has actually happened and a final determination was reached by the school, or schools where there is a policy that apparently provides a rule for cases such as these.
Some possibilities:
He’s in trouble with the school, and might be suspended or expelled, but any credits or degrees that he earned are safe.
He’s in trouble, and the school could void any credits or degrees earned so far at State.
One example is Adam B Wheeler, who claimed to have graduated from Phillips Andover and claimed to have been studying at MIT (he was a transfer applicant). Part of the problem is that he received scholarships and grant money, so he’s being charged with fraud. But I’m not sure what the charges would be if he hadn’t received any money.
This has happened (at least) twice at Yale in the past two decades. A man named Lon Grammer forged his way into New Haven in the 1990s and was charged with larceny for accepting thousands of dollars in financial aid under false pretenses (he falsified his previous transcripts and wrote letters of recommendation from people who didn’t exist). An article from the NYT on the subject:
Both were caught before they graduated, so I can only presume that no degrees were granted. I can understand why Yale reacted the way it did–being admitted under false pretenses not only steals financial aid, but it also steals a precious slot from a student who actually did put in the necessary work.
(OK, my inner cynic tells me that Yale wasn’t happy about the implications of Lon Grammer’s deception–an “average” student gets in; his grades aren’t spectacular but still sufficient for at least a C average, which is enough to earn a Yale B.A. and the attendant privileges that it can endow. But what the guy did was still wrong.)
The second article mentions another person, Tonica Jenkins, who lied her way into a grad program at Yale. And I’ve heard that there is a lot of fraud among applicants from mainland China, especially in the part of the application that attempts to judge the student’s fluency in English.
But could they, theoretically, apply again to Yale, this time honestly, and continue their studies where they left off, or could they transfer to, say, Florida State with their real transcript and transfer in the Yale credits?
I have wondered (but don’t worry a whole lot about) what would happen if a future audit were to discover that I should have been held back in 8th grade rather than promoted to high school (though, I don’t know any reason why I would have needed to be), or whether I am perpetually at risk of allegations that an admissions officer at my alma mater accidentally misfiled a recommendation letter and that I never should have gotten in to college in the first place, putting my degree at risk. (though, possibly the result would be different since I wouldn’t have had the intent to cheat)
There was a NYTime article about how the “admission consultants” in China “help” the applicant with their english proficiency essays; and how the students then have to spend a lot more time in remedial English.
Interesting. I never considered the fraud angle with respect to grants. I suppose that student loans (not grants or scholarships) might be different because they have to be paid back (though this is getting off topic and veering toward the elements of Fraud).
Never had a student loan - but don’t they give “no interest until you graduate” and a reduced interest rate after that? Getting less than market rate by lying would be considered getting a financial benefit through fraud.
Ok, there have been several references as to what has happened with regard to grants that a person received as a result of fraudulent admission. This aspect seems pretty clear now. Thanks!
Has any school had to deal with (i.e. they made a decision on) what happens to credits and degrees earned? E.g. can Transcript Forger keep the credits or degrees that he earned from the school he fraudulently got into (as long as he didn’t cheat in those classes…), or does he have to start over? I’m picturing a (probably fairly unlikely) scenario where a person is one semester from graduation and the school files a fraudulent admission allegation at the Honor Office and the student is faced with the possibility of having to start all over again with Freshman Composition and Calculus 1.
The relevant part of your question is the word earned.
Regardless of how he got into the school or the class, he earned the grade he got based on the coursework done in that class. If he did the work, he is entitled to the credit.
A school who tried to deprive him of the credit for the work he did could face a lawsuit from him, and would probably lose. If a person uses false credentials to get a job, and is then discovered, the employer can fire him. But I don’t know of any cases where the employer can make him give back the salary he earned while he was employed*. I would think the same would apply to a school – they could expel him, but couldn’t take away the credits he had earned. (And given the bad publicity, they probably wouldn’t even try.)
The exceptions are where the fake credentials of the employee make the work he did unacceptable. For example, an engineer who didn’t have the required state license, so plans he did are no longer useable as legal engineering plans. Or a lawyer, doctor, veterinarian, or anybody who holds a state license to do their work.
Ex-college prof here. They really do block frauds’ credits. They will not get any transcript nor acknowledgement of attendance, ever. It’s as if they never attended the school.
The credits are not considered validly earned. The fraud has no chance of winning a lawsuit.
They are in effect pretending to be someone else. They didn’t earn the credit. A fictitous person did. And like George P. Burdell and the like, fake people don’t really get to keep credits.
(And tuition isn’t refunded either, unless it’s early in the term and normal refund rules still apply.)
But what is a “credit” worth, honestly, if the college you earned it at is going to tell people “yes, he took that course, but he also lied on his admissions form”? You certainly won’t be able to transfer it to another institution to earn a degree there. Maybe you learned certain skills in that class (how to program in Java, say), but if you only need that skill, your employer isn’t going to particularly care where you learned it.
In other words, if your hypothetical student wanted to go to court in order to force his former college to give him a transcript marked “ADMISSION RESCINDED DUE TO APPLICATION FRAUD”, I suppose he could. But I’m not sure it would be worth his time.
ETA: Oh, and even if your hypothetical student earned all the credits for the degree, the University could probably still rescind it. Courts have generally held that a university/college can rescind a degree if it feels that continuing to certify your degree would make a mockery of its standards. For example, this finding states:
Since the murderer was a juvenile at the time of the crime she may not have been
technically obliged to admit anything during the application process. Nevertheless
Harvard, Columbia and Barnard rescinded their acceptance decisions.
Well, I have a friend who forged a reference letter to get into an Ivy (which I will not name). As he was graduating a member of the admissions committee told him it was one of the most effective letters he had ever seen and was the only thing that got him in (I assume his HS transcript was mediocre at best). But he graduated with honors. When he told the admissions guy that he had written that letter, he described the guy going white, but nothing was ever done about it. What could they do? He had graduated with honors and that was that. He went to Princeton for grad school and finished a PhD in two years (the course requirements were minimal in those days) based largely on a rewrite of his undergrad thesis (which was an extraordinary piece of work to be sure and well worth a PhD). He had a long and successful career and retired just a couple years ago.
It seems to me that no matter how you got in, what you do there is, in the end, the only thing that matters. I don’t understand how you can say he didn’t earn his degree.
I’m not doubting the veracity of this story, but it seems odd that an admissions officer would remember a student four years after their admission, and it’s highly unlikely that one letter was the only thing that got him in. (I was a volunteer admissions officer for Harvard College years ago.) In highly competitive admissions, one has to excel in a number of areas, not just one.
I don’t know what possessed this person to admit to forging the letter, but I am fairly certain that such an admission would likely spur an investigation - which indeed, could result in the revocation of a degree. (Having served on a committee of rights and responsibilities [a plagiarism/judicial board], this sounds like the sort of thing we would hear.) There is a level of trust that is extended to applicants, and if such a story were true and got out, then there is a serious problem that admissions committees have to deal with. One can easily see how a school would need to act swiftly and punitively so that people understand that this is not a tactic one should pursue.