Reply to Feds uncover large-scale college entrance exam cheating plot

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]How the ACT/SAT cheating part was done is crazy. Mark Riddell, a 36 year old Harvard grad, would fly in to one of the cheating test sites in Texas or California. The students were told to tell the testing people they had to take the test there if they were not from the area that they had a bah mitzvah or something. Mark Riddell would either take the test for them, sit with them and tell them the answers while they took it, or change the answers for it. He did this for multiple tests including the subject tests. 
[b]
Also applications were faked with made up sports and ethnicities.[/b] The girl who got into Georgetown had him take her tests and got a fake tennis history made up.

I hope they release all 700 names. Just follow the money. Most of the students knew. Also I don’t think future students should have to take these standardized tests. They are paying College Board for a test that only measures how well you can cheat.[/quote]

[b]This shows that colleges don't really verify these activities[/b]. [/quote]
And this seems to be the craziest part of this story! Taking this logic to the extreme, why do colleges ask for transcripts, while they just should take the applicants' word for it.
Ridiculous.[/quote]

No. They relied on their own staff—the coaches—to verify this. It’s reasonable to expect that your coach wants excellent athletes on his/her team and can vet this.  Instead, these coaches broke that trust with their employer. This scam happened because there were coaches that were in on the false records, not because they were tricked by fake stats.

As for transcripts, they are coming directly from the school, not the applicant. [/quote]

In the fake athlete cases, the parents and Singer went to great lengths to keep the kids’ high school counselors out of the loop because the counselors knew they were not recruited athletes. The article in today’s Post says Georgetown “stumbled” onto problems with the tennis coach through routine conversations with high school counselors. So admissions officers should contact high school counselors to verify that applicants for athlete slots truly athletic recruits. Coaches might say that counselors can’t evaluate athletic ability, but if a student is legitimately being recruited as a major college athlete he/she would share that information with their school counselor, it would be common knowledge at the school, and the student would almost certainly be recruited by more than one college, so if the counselor knows nothing about athletic accomplishments, then they probably do not exist. [/quote]

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