How to fake your way through Harvard.

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He's like the screw-up, education version of Catch Me If You Can :laugh:
 
Ive heard that if you are going to lie, lie BIG.... it worked, I guess it was just the greediness that got him.
 
I need to talk to this guy.

If he was good enough to forge an MIT transcript, and Official SAT scores maybe he can forge me a 39 MCAT (13, 13, 13).

Ah, wishful thinking.
 
Augustus said:
I love this guy. He came up with languages nobody speaks so nobody could ever call him out on it. Brilliance. He might as well say he speaks Babylonian.
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That's pretty sharp, I must say.
 
I wonder what he was ultimatley aiming for, like terminal degree?
 
wow... after pulling that off, maybe harvard should just let him in for outsmarting them, haha 😛
 
I wonder if he really got into Bowdoin or forged his way in there, because thats also a really good school
 
hmmm I guess everyone has the same questions

-How can we really trust the admissions process? Harvard must have done an awful background check

-How did he forge so well to almost graduate harvard AND get the rhodes?
 
he would have gotten away with it if he didn't get greedy and apply for the rhodes....
 
Yeah, I also wonder what his goal is. You think if he wanted to, could he con his way through the med school admissions process?
 
Well my question is how many people before him have been successful? LOL.
 
All this article demonstrates is that every year there are likely thousands of applicants who get into institutions, especially highly ranked ones, due to "exaggerations" of truths and garden variety hyperboles. The funniest part is that there are even SDN members pretty familiar with the process - they might even learn a thing or two. Just like the adcoms don't have the time to review every "sub-par" applicant before rejection, they also don't have time to review the "qualified" applicant's true merits.

Let's not forget, this guy got caught only because he was unlucky enough that one of his professors had one in a 500K chance of being familiar with the work he plagiarized. Had he not gone for Rhodes, he'd be a Harvard graduate. What does this say about the thousands of other applicants who are average, but choose to somehow embellish their resumes, to a far lesser degree than the hero of our story?

Finally, you don't actually have to lie on your application to fake it. Many of us know premeds who have so many activities that the 15 lines in AMCAS is a joke and not nearly enough space to list those activities. Since I am more of a "do one thing and do it well" person, I was curious once about a couple of premeds who had a total of more than 15 activities compared to 2-3 activities that me and my friends had. It turned out that many students are pretty good at working the system and choosing activities in advance based on the AMCAS list. They enroll in many different clubs (you just pay and don't have to participate, or maybe once a month), choose sports with easy awards (some clubs make it pretty easy to get different colors of belts in karate with little time investment), select arcane activities that sound very impressive on paper, but in reality are fluff (one guy listed that he was a mountain climber and conquered some tough, unknown local peaks, yet he was more like a hiker). The bottom line is that when an admissions officer pays too much attention to the quantity of your activities rather than the quality, a great disservice is done to both the school and especially the students. The most active premeds and pre-grad students I have known have only been involved in one, sometimes two activities, but they were experts at what they did because they did not waste any time in meaningless organizations or waste time tying to find which organizations did not have any meetings so they could join those. This entire process needs an overhaul. The activities list on AMCAS should either be contracted to 5 or expanded to 40. I can almost guarantee that every single year you'd have applicants filling up at least 30 of those spots:laugh:. By the way, I think we need a poll on SDN about the average number of activities filled on AMCAS and their nature. I'd be surprised if most premeds here did not fill the list almost to the top.
 
More activities != meaningless. I filled up my 15 AMCAS slots, but I wouldn't go anywhere close to calling any of what I put on there "fluff" or crap.

It's easy to initially game the system (i.e., put a bunch of worthless junk on an application or lie on an application), but it should also be very easy to see what is legitimate or not (i.e., simply asking about it in an interview). One's representation on paper and representation in person/upon further questioning should be very different if their activities are extremely superficial.
 
ColeOnTheRoll said:
More activities != meaningless. I filled up my 15 AMCAS slots, but I wouldn't go anywhere close to calling any of what I put on there "fluff" or crap.

It's easy to initially game the system (i.e., put a bunch of worthless junk on an application or lie on an application), but it should also be very easy to see what is legitimate or not (i.e., simply asking about it in an interview). One's representation on paper and representation in person/upon further questioning should be very different if their activities are extremely superficial.
Click to expand...

A random aside, I noticed SDN is filled with too many computer nerds, I have seen code within 4 threads today....
 
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