Wow A girl at my university was suspended today. She was a pre-law student with a 4.0 GPA and LSAT score of 165/180. She was also involved in several activities and in honor socieites like Omnicron Delta Kappa. So what happend, according to my school newspaper, she apparently wrote a letter of recommendation and signed it with a professor's name without his consent or letting him know. She sent it off to the law schools. One of the law school was suspicious since the letter was in SUCH high praise of herself. For example, she wrote something like "In my 20 years of teaching, never had I encountered such a brilliant mind as (name)" and other loads of stuff. The law school called our school to verify the letter since we do have a letter service for pre med pre law pre dent pre anything service. The professor was called and he said he never wrote the letter nor did she ever asked him to write a letter. So now she is suspended from our school and is not allowed to apply to the law schools she had originally applied since they told her she is "banned" or something. Poor girl. Sucks huh?
I don't understand why she would do that with a 4.0 and 165 LSAT - it sounds like she could have gotten a great letter from someone if she had asked. I have absolutely no sympathy for her.
I personally caught 3 people turn in lab reports that wern't their last year, and now non of them can apply to grad schools for 2 years and they failed the class. I don't have to much sympathy.
165 on the LSAT isn't *that* great..I mean, it's respectable, but usually 168 and above is considered l337. too bad she wrote that letter, though...bleh..I h8 cheaterz
good for the school. I'd hope something would go in her permanent file explaining what happened so every school she ever sends a transcript to will find out.
Hmm, yeah, ...and while they're at it, why don't they put a big red scarlet letter on her forehead.... come on - people make silly mistakes sometimes - yes she should be punished, but once she's paid her dues, she should be able to carry on without this haunting her her entire life....we even give most criminals that
If a note were included with her transcript, then each school she applied to in the future could make up it's collective mind. To not do so would be to keep important information from schools she's applying to....but then again, I bet all schools ask if you've ever been convicted of an honor code violation (or whatever)....but then again, she could just lie again....
Were you their classmate? Do they know that you were the one that turned them in? If so, what was their reaction towards you???
It's been a while since I looked at the percentiles, but I know that 163 or higher is 90th percentile. I think that 165 is about 95th percentile. 168 or 169 is 99th Percentile. I don't know what l337 is? Do you mean it's comparable to 1337 SAT? With a 4.0 and 165 she was virually guaranteed a spot in any law school except the top five in the country, and she may have even had a chance at some of the top five schools.
i think that she is highly likely to be depressed later on her life. And she is insecure about herself. Maybe a little maniac, too.
I have no sympathy for her. It clearly states that you can be banned if you lie in the rules for applying to law school. What an idiot! Faking a letter is extremely serious, because of the reputations of professors and such. Law school is about ethics, and she doesn't belong there. -RA
She wouldn't have been a great lawyer anyway. A good future lawyer would have pulled it off without being caught.
I know of someone who got in trouble for giving his computor program to another guy who he thought was extremely smart, in fact a computor genius. The whizzkid was only supposed to look at it overnight but instead he copied it word for word and handed it in! He was just lazy and assumed the prof never actually read them. So the prof had two 'original' programs exactly the same and they both had to go to the dean for academic misconduct. After all was explained, the friend of mine eventually got off very lightly with a note in his record that was later expunged. Dont know what happened to the "genius" He is probably working for Enron by now
Well, I may be remembering the exact percentiles incorrectly but she still would have gotten into almost every law school in the country. Also, at least when I took it in 1995, your scaled score (120-180) is always the same percentile, and it didn't depend on the test. I looked at 6-7 old tests and they had identical scaled score/percentile conversions. When I received my score, it also had an identical conversion. Now, what raw score (0-101) correlated with what scaled score did vary from test to test. All this may have changed in the last seven years though.
I second that, I know an old friend who cheated his way through hs, got into princeton and then continued cheating until he got caught in the spring of senior year... he got suspended from both hs and got his acceptance revoked from princeton..... some people just can't stop themselves. Until they learn better, they get what they deserve. You can't expect sympathy for people who do desparate things in situations where it is totally ludicrous and uncalled for. If you are willing to make unecessary shortcuts now, imagine what you will try and get away with later on?! .........I have to write down the name of everyone who I've even spoken to about a lab report or problem set or I risk immediate failure in the class and dismissal from my program. When you choose to become a doctor, even when you choose to become a lawyer (I know, its hard for me to say it), you choose to accept a cannon of ethics by which you are bound; if you can't follow your college's ethics rules long enough to apply and gain admission into a grad school than you probably wouldn't have been able to abide by professional ethics codes after graduating anyway.
kind of makes you wonder how many people do this *without* being caught. after all, how often do schools verify letters of recommendation by calling the college, or verify every grade in a transcript?
Sorry, I'm not Jalby but I can answer this question for you. From my recollection, Jalby was TAing last year so most likely they were his students. This should also answer the second question for you.
NO, I don't feel the slightest bit sorry for her. I can't believe she had the nerve to forge a letter. I'm glad she was caught.
One time when I was grading lab reports for a chem. class, one student had the audacity to turn in an old lab report from last quarter as his own. He was so lazy that he didnt even bother copying the information over to a new sheet but just used an old report. What an idiot! Unfortunately, the professor was lenient and just gave him a zero for that lab. He should have been kicked out. Oh well. Jetson
ok, please don't flame me for saying this . . . but imagine this situation-- Girl asks prof to write Rec. Prof says SURE. Before the Girl can have her prof write the letter, Prof conveniently forgets all about it. Girl is in trouble. Girl has a deadline. No body to write her another letter at such short notice. Girl has already written her own letter because prof had originally told her that, "Go write yours, and I will sign it." Girl prints that letters. Re-reads it. Thinks it's good enough. "Hey, it can't hurt anybody but me" she says. Prof was not going to check on the letter anyways. She prints it, signs it...and voila. I don't want to condone what she did. In fact, in my eyes she should never be allowed to be a lawyer because certain character traits are inherent to us that we can't change and I doubt she will. BUT, we do need to realize that people make some really wrong choices in life. i don't think anybody would have PLANNED something like this from Day 1. This seems to be an act of desperation. True, it doesn't make it right. But we have all done some things we are not proud of, out of desperation. The reason I say this is because my LOR person had asked me to write my own letter and said he would sign it. Well, I wrote the letter, except when I went for him to sign it, he was out of town!!! I was freaking out because I had deadlines left and right. I called up the secretary and asked her if she has his "signature stamp" and she did. (most secretaries have stamps made of their prof/doc's signature, and they can sign in lieu of the prof in such situations). I am lucky because I never had to use that stamp signature, but hey. . . . .I was desperate enough to ask the secretary if SHE could sign it for him like she does most of his other papers anyway.
Word. The whole thing is a tragedy. It's regrettable that she made such an egregiously foolish mistake. However, it's the height of hypocrisy for law schools to conspire to keep her out of the profession for life. One mistake like this shouldn't shape the rest of her professional life when much, much more severe legal transgressions are more leniently punished.
I think there's more than just the law school part to consider. I think she'd have problems later in life, because the Bar probably wouldn't look very kindly on this. She basically started her whole law career on a lie. And a blatent lie too. She wrote an overwhelmingly favorable letter without even consulting the prof at all. She had never even asked him to write the letter. There aren't really any excuses for this. -RA
it doesn't make all that much sense, though, because lor's aren't that important in getting into law school. when i was applying, i remember hearing that they might come into play in a tie-breaker situation or on scholarship decisions, but you mainly get in based on your numbers. it's too bad for her that she got busted doing something that probably wouldn't help her that much anyway. not letting her into law school, though, is probably good for her because she would definitely have trouble being able to sit for the bar. at least now she can do something else.
I believe that she would have a lot of trouble passing the background check of most state bars. I know someone that did some research on this, and it varies from state to state. However, if someone does something that involves fraudulent behavior, which this did (it would actually constitute a misdemeanor in my state), and if it was fairly recent, which this would also be, it can be pretty difficult. Some states take the background check more seriously than others. In fact, I know of someone who committed a crime while in law school. He could not gain admission to the Illinois bar, but he was able to gain admission to California. Go figure. It wasn't a fraudulent crime though. It was statutory rape, where he claimed he did not know the girl was underage (which is not a defense to statutory rape). This was not a friend of mine by the way. Just someone I knew. The fact that the women this post centers around committed a dishonest act that is so directly related to the profession will hurt her quite a bit. There are enough dishonest and shady lawyers out there, that most state bar associations are very hesitant to admit more people that will possibly violate the ethical rules. She may still get admitted to law school and may get admitted to the bar but I think, at the very least, it will take some time. Maybe a number of years, and she won't be guaranteed anything. She may go to law school and still get refused admittance to the bar. It's difficult to tell because the state bars are all over the place on this. People committ felonies and get admitted, people get a ticket for urinating in public and don't get admitted. But again, the fact that it is so recent, and not something that happened ten years ago, really hurts her.
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