Reply to Student Reveals That Stanford Rescinded College Offer Months After Due To A ‘Lie’ On Her Application

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "Student Reveals That Stanford Rescinded College Offer Months After Due To A ‘Lie’ On Her Application"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think Stanford must have some kind of trained anti-fraud investigators on their admissions team. 20 years ago when I applied to Stanford Law I got a call from the head of admissions asking about why I had listed myself as “valedictorian” of my college class when my college didn’t do rankings. I was so panicked. My college had selected me as the graduation speaker from the top 5 GPAs (so I was told) and in my mind, giving the college commencement speech was being “valedictorian,” [b]but I guess that was a misrepresentation. [/b]I had them talk to the dean of students at my college to verify that I was the commencement speaker. But that was a very sobering experience and since then I have been excruciatingly honest on all applications. [/quote]
You guess?[/quote]

At the time, I thought that “valedictorian” just meant the person who gives the speech (which I did). I didn’t realize it would be seen as a misrepresentation. I didn’t write down “first in the class” or anything like that. [/quote]

Ummm, sure?  You were "smart enough" to seriously apply to Stanford Law, yet not smart enough to know what a valedictorian is?

Not buying that
[/quote]

It’s a strange, reverse psychology justification.  The person who finishes first in the class gets to give the speech…hence, if I am invited to give the speech I must be first in the class because that’s who is invited to give the speech.

I like it…you just need to sell it and never deviate.[/quote]

I was among the top 5 and the definition of valedictorian is “the student usually having the highest rank in a graduating class who delivers the valedictory address at the commencement exercises.” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/valedictorian

Obviously I understood that this was a misstep when I got the call but I definitely wasn’t consciously lying. (And the Standord admin seemed to accept that.) But it certainly wasn’t as accurate as it should have been and I failed to consider that some people would think it was a misrepresentation. So yeah it was wrong and since then I engage in zero puffery on resumes, even wording that most people consider harmless.

Once I was also accused of lying about being fluent in Spanish in a job interview when the interviewer called his buddy and said (in Spanish) “I have this girl here who claims she knows Spanish” and when he hung up, I just calmly said “Oh, I guess you learned Spanish in Argentina” (nailed the accent he used.) [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics