College Admissions Cheaters Often Win

The biggest myth that admissions offices present is that the review process is a science. Holistic review isn’t a precise thermometer that measures temperature accurately. In reality, it’s neither an art nor a science but a series of hunches and gut feelings.

Even supposedly objective criteria such as grades and AP scores can be gamed by savvy students, further calling into question whether reviewers can decipher what is authentic or not.

By cheating, I don’t have in mind falsifying resume credentials on an application or lying on an essay.

I see posts from time to time about admissions counselors who claim they can tell fraud or not, but can they really when they read applications in less than ten minutes and hundreds if not thousands of applications each cycle? They’re reading way too quickly to assess the claims you make at anything other than face value. Reviewers usually take the applicant’s word for it.

Some portals, such as the University of California, have shifted to students self-reporting their grades and SAT scores. Because that information is easily verified with an official transcript required for enrollment, very few students cheat on that portion of the application. I imagine for every thousand students who misrepresent themselves on an application, perhaps one is actually caught and “blacklisted” with their name circulated among elite institutions. Reviewers can’t detect fraud with any reliability, although they love to claim omnipotence on the subject to scare would-be deceivers.

By cheating, I have in mind the time-tested tradition of looking over your classmate’s shoulder. Donald McCabe with the Center for Academic Integrity conducted a longitudinal survey of 70,000 high school students from 2002 to 2015. Two-thirds of students admitted to cheating on a test or plagiarizing a paper, with 95 percent of respondents admitting to some form of cheating. 

Because the penalties for academic dishonesty are so high, no student will ever publicly admit to fraud. On the contrary, people accused of cheating will deploy any means to denounce the charge and preserve their reputations, often committing themselves to further lying on top of the initial cheating. There are no incentives to come clean unless it’s to snitch on other cheaters and receive leniency.

Rutger Bregman in Humankind undermines the conventional narrative that humans are innately selfish and prone to evil. He argues that people are generally decent and aren’t intrinsically motivated to lie and cheat. We want to get along and feel included in our family and communities. Poor incentives within society nudge people toward bad behavior.

Our modern society inverts pro-social virtues such as honesty and integrity in favor of winning, even if that means fraud, deceit, or manipulation. 

“Blaming the system” doesn’t excuse or absolve the cheater who deserves some form of punishment. “Everyone else is doing it” also isn’t an acceptable defense. We’re left with a situation where the unfortunate few who are caught pay steep penalties. As long as the admissions arms race persists, cheating will be a natural response, a problem most educators and admissions staff prefer to ignore. Consequently, cheating is a silent yet systemic social problem.

Many of my clients go on extensive rants about pervasive cheating in their classes (although, predictably, none ever admit to cheating themselves). Some even write college essays criticizing their underhanded classmates.

A group of students once pulled me aside at a high school visit when I worked for UT-Austin, begging me to do something about their unscrupulous valedictorian. Honest students resent their classmates who show up to class unprepared and swipe scantrons from a teacher’s desk or circulate answers among a group of cheaters. Traditional definitions of plagiarism are inadequate for the smartphone generation.

There is no part of the college application that a determined family can’t manipulate. One recommendation by Varsity Blues ringleader Rick Singer involved referring students to online schools where students could independently study AP classes. Earning high grades at less-rigorous high schools boosted the applicant’s overall GPA and class rank.  Supplementing coursework isn’t explicitly illegal. Few if any artificially inflated GPAs will get detected by admissions counselors. Many students opt to take summer school classes at their primary campus to earn more grade points and free up space for more GPA-boosting AP classes.

In the past few years, I noticed a substantial uptick in students earning 4s and 5s on more than 15 AP exams, many of who self-studied. I asked a few how they managed to balance what seemed like an impossible course load for even the most ambitious students. Never implicating themselves, they admitted that on obscure corners of the internet, you could illicitly access AP question test banks provided by College Board intended for use explicitly by teachers to help their students prepare. Memorize the test bank and skim official preparation resources, and there is a decent chance you will pass, especially during the COVID period’s online exams reduced to less than an hour. Cheating is an efficient strategy for overworked and sleep-deprived students.

A Redditor laments in a mocking post, since deleted, about a cheating classmate who gained early admission to Harvard. “[Their cheating] coupled with all those posts about people faking passion and being admitted to schools that are like wE cAn TeLl WhEn yOu ArEn’t PassiOnate, should remind you that AOs AREN’T ALL-KNOWING JUDGES OF YOUR WORTH.”

Because most students know at least one cheater who will inevitably gain admission, cheaters’ successes undermine the entire higher education system’s integrity. The college admissions madness incentivizes everyone to cut corners, with few unwilling to face social exclusion by being labeled a snitch.

Another user responded to the disgruntled post that “[the saying] ‘cheaters never prosper’ is absolute bullshit.” They’re right.

Admissions counselors aren’t Saint Peter with an all-seeing God on their side that can pierce the hearts of any soul. They’re more like a Judge Judy that squawks a lot but doesn’t have any unique insights into human character. Cheaters often win, including electing to the presidency a man who cheats on his wives and lies about everything from recorded phone calls with world leaders down to his golf handicap.

Cheating Lessons

Professor James Lang argues in Cheating Lessons that academically dishonest climates are pervasive at all levels of education.  He estimates at least two-thirds of all students will cheat at least once. A few become the habitual deceivers that appear in college essays or frustrated Reddit posts. Extrinsic rewards such as gaining admission to elite universities or earning a prestigious internship normalize dishonest behavior because the means justify the ends. Students are responding to incentives in their environment. Honesty requires more courage than surrendering to the pressures to take shortcuts.

Professor Mollie Galloway expands in a review of Lang’s book that cheating isn’t necessarily more pervasive than in previous generations. Still, dishonest behavior is less stigmatized and perceived as increasingly normal. “The [educational] culture encourages students, particularly those from upper-middle-class and affluent communities, to see cheating not as a compromising of their values but rather as a warranted and morally sound mechanism by which to attain the status they believe they are afforded.”

A few high schools cultivate a culture of cheating.

Administrations feel pressure to maximize their AP exams passed or SAT scores earned to recruit future cohorts of students. Schools receive accolades when their graduates earn prestigious scholarships or university spaces. There are subtle pressures for teachers to turn a blind eye or administrators to cover up academically dishonest behavior. Teachers who are committed to honesty fight a never-ending battle like trying to stop alcohol consumption during Prohibition. Alcoholics will find a way to drink, and students will find a way to cheat.

Institutions punishing cheaters and plagiarizers is so rare that, when it happens, the incident often makes national news.

Cheating at New York City’s most prestigious magnet school, Stuyvesant, didn’t end after they fired their principal, Stanley Teitel, for covering up a 66-student cheating ring in 2013. The New York Post reports five years later, “Cheating is most common among students in their third year, the most academically challenging because the grades count heavily on college applications, the December survey found. A whopping 97 percent of juniors said they had engaged in academic dishonesty, while 56 percent of freshman said they had already cheated after just four months in the school.” Stuyvesant is the second-largest feeder high school in the country for MIT, Princeton, and Harvard.

The Tragic Case of T.M. Landry

The most heartbreaking example of a culture of systematic cheating occurred at Louisiana’s T.M. Landry. Named for the husband-and-wife-founders and principals Tracey and Mike Landry, it is an unaccredited college preparatory school housed in an abandoned factory. When Landry seniors started gaining admission to Cornell, Stanford, Princeton, and Harvard, among many other elite universities, between 2013 and 2018, it seemed like a tremendous success story.

Landry enrolls mostly black students from rural Louisiana, a state with one of the nation’s lowest-performing education systems. Black families placed their trust in the Landrys, who promoted family and unity and an alternative education outside of white society’s norms. The Landrys announced their 100 percent four-year college acceptance rate, made famous by viral YouTube “decision reveal” videos viewed millions of times. Wealthy families and organizations donated hundreds of thousands of dollars, and white and Asian students began enrolling.

Educators and school administrators nationwide wondered how Landry students could overcome such long odds. A New York Times investigation revealed a culture of violence, abuse, and outright fraud. “Visitors and cameras paraded through what had become a Potemkin village.” 

Because the school wasn’t accredited, they do not receive any government funding and consequently fall outside regulations and oversight. Class attendance was optional. It was, as one student described it, a “house built on water.”

Mike Landry humiliated and demanded absolute obedience from his students, resulting in a 2013 conviction for battery. He required students to begin class by saying “I love you” in different languages, including an invented language, Mike-a-nese, to him directly. “Love” in Mike-a-nese is the word “kneel.”

Students and families began speaking out following abuse allegations and substandard classroom instruction. Mr. Landry threatened to withhold transcripts if anyone left the school or blew the whistle. Students who chose to leave had their grades altered to ruin their future college prospects. He threatened students that elite university admissions officers had cameras in the school, so they better behave themselves.

T.M. Landry’s Ivy League success comes down to outright fraud. Mike Landry doctored transcripts to show outstanding grades for loyal students, even for advanced courses that they never took or weren’t offered at the school. The Landrys pressured students to report their family incomes as low as possible on the applications. Teachers recycled recommendation letters to laud students for extracurricular activities that didn’t exist. In some instances, teachers recycled recommendations from previous years for future students without changing the names.

The Landrys counseled students to “go deep” on their essays, which pressured students to exaggerate or fabricate hardships that play into racial stereotypes and poverty tropes. They were the kinds of hardship stories that elite universities eat up. The only genuine instruction that students received revolved around the ACT. It was the only admissions factor that T.M. Landry staff couldn’t easily manipulate. One graduate, Bryson Sassau, commented, “If it wasn’t on the ACT, I didn’t know it.”

T.M. Landry’s graduates had mixed results at their respective elite colleges. Some earned their degrees despite entering college with writing and math skills that were many grade levels below their college classmates. Others, especially those who spent the most time at T.M. Landry, floundered and dropped out.

Because their high school degrees weren’t accredited, some alumni had to earn their GED to enroll at local colleges and begin their studies again. Landry college prep destroyed dozens of families whose elementary-age children didn’t learn phonics. High school juniors tested in reading at a fourth-grade level.

Mike Landry defended himself by appealing to a culture that values credentials over character. “So what, we’re not accredited… Three years in a row, Harvard took us. Stanford has taken us.”

Taking a page out of the corporate public relations playbook, the Landrys employed the law firm Couhig Partners to respond to the Times’s allegations. Couhig based their 23-page report on five interviews that excluded the dozens of testimonies investigated by the Times. Predictably, their internal investigation minimizes the claims and amounts to “move along now, nothing to see here,” while noting that there might be areas for minor improvement.

In other words, the means justify the ends.

The tragedy of T.M. Landry embodies the admissions madness taken to its logical conclusion. The Landrys are a symptom of the admissions madness, not a cause.

Elite universities seek diverse, academically stellar students. High schools everywhere will respond to these incentives, and families want to send their children to schools with a noted track record of success. In the worst-case scenarios, school cultures cater their entire curriculum and deploy any measures to meet those expectations at the expense of genuine learning or even a safe learning environment.

Universities are to blame

T.M. Landry and Varsity Blues are two sides of the same coin. The former exploited an admissions system that values diversity, whereas the latter defrauded universities by leveraging extreme wealth and privilege. As with the Varsity Blues scandal, university administrators responded in horror, wondering how such a thing could occur. Yet, they’re the architects of a system that creates such perverse incentives that distort basic human decency. Look in the mirror!

It’s also ironic that, on the one hand, admissions officers claim to know the context and resources of a given high school, while on the other, the Landrys hoodwinked dozens of elite colleges over a series of application cycles. If universities can’t reliably catch a fraudulent high school, why would we believe they can consistently identify individual cheaters?

In Talking with Strangers, Malcolm Gladwell suggests that we’re generally trusting and tend to default to the truth. In UT admissions, senior staff trained us to presume what a student writes or reports on their resume is true. Admissions processes aren’t set up to identify fraud or look for subtle discrepancies in transcripts relative to a school’s profile.

I don’t believe the posturing of a former Stanford admissions counselor who posted a Reddit thread under the username “empowerly,” insinuating that applicants will get caught if they cheat.  Given infinite time and resources, it’s theoretically possible to catch most cheaters most of the time. However, there simply isn’t enough time, sufficient information, or willpower to detect fraud in practice. Admissions gatekeepers are not the gods that they convey themselves to be publicly. Pretending to be all-powerful causes more harm than good and injects more anxiety into the system.

The immediate result of posts like that of the former Stanford counselor was to create a sense of paranoia among student Redditors. Dozens of comments wondered, “Will my ECs seem exaggerated? What if they contact my counselor?” The most honest response reads, “I presume you know that some students will take advantage of this information and lie better.”

Sentiments like /u/empowerly’s reinforce college admissions counselors’ omniscience that provides the architecture for T.M. Landry to deceive their students that universities watched them. We are reluctant to acknowledge cheating unless there is overwhelming evidence suggesting fraud occurred.

Educators are also averse to leveling claims of fraud against a student unless they’re highly certain. Their reputations and careers are at stake if they wrongly accuse a student. It isn’t surprising that the Landrys’ deceit succeeded for many admissions cycles. To their credit, at least some of their unwitting alumni earned life-transforming elite college degrees that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.

Cheaters, whether they are aware of their dishonesty or not, often win.