College entrance exam fraud

Several months ago, I posted about a private school in Louisiana that has gotten a lot of black kids into Ivy League and other top tier schools. They did it by focusing almost entirely on the ACT. It's rare that a minority who is not an athlete will get into one of these schools with average or below average test scores, and this private school knew this. The problem with this school was that it didn't really teach anything other than the ACT, so some of the students struggled in college. The head of the school also has credible allegations against him of abusing children and a previous conviction.

The preference that is given to black and Latino students is exaggerated. If it were so easy for black and brown students to gain admission, I would have gotten into every college I applied to. I'm black and a woman. My SAT scores were above average, and my high school GPA was a 3.7 --- not amazing but still pretty decent. I took honors, pre-AP, AP, and dual enrollment courses. I also played basketball and did track and field and was a member of an honors society. I still received rejection letters. When applying to doctoral programs, I had a high GPA from my master's program, an above average quantitative score (slightly below average quantitative scores were acceptable since these weren't math-heavy programs), and a far above average verbal score. My verbal score was in the 88th percentile, far above the average score of accepted students. I still received rejection emails even though my GRE scores were high enough for me to be accepted to a social science program at a school like Columbia. An Indian guy on these fora asked why I went to TESU and Angelo State University because I should be able to get in anywhere as a black woman. That's a bunch of bull!

Some elite schools might be flexible and accept a black or Latino student who scored a 1400 on the SAT instead of a 1500, but they aren't accepting a bunch of students with low SAT/ACT scores. Black and Latino students usually make up a very small percentage of the student bodies at prestigious schools, and most of the people admitted at Ivy League schools for being athletes are white.

The same applies to government jobs. That same ignorant Indian guy who thinks that black people are taking all the college seats and jobs away from Asians said that it should be easy for me to land a job with the federal government. I've been applying for about eight years, and I've submitted at least 300 applications.

 

In Fall 2018, 3.1% of the freshmen at UC Berkeley were African American/Black, 10.8% were Mexican American/Chicano, and 3.8% Other Hispanic/Latino. Yeah, it seems like the UC system accepts anyone who is black or Latino no matter how low their test scores are.

 

I have no issue with your comments. I was being a bit provocative in that elite schools are merely elite at the front. Any fool, rich or poor can exit with a degree.

 

its getting worse

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/fallout-from-college-admissions-scandal-worsening-for-accused-parents-schools/ar-BBURjFE?ocid=spartandhp

 

Introducing . . . Versatile PhD

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/03/15/popular-career-platform-phds-owned-foundation-behind-uncovered-undergraduate

 

The backstory keeps getting better

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-03-15-ringleader-of-admissions-scam-also-ran-a-college-counseling-firm-for-families-in-china

 

USC stopping everyone involved from attending.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/19/us/usc-admissions-scam-class-registration-hold/index.html

 

I wonder if this is going to affect U.S. News rankings. U.S News has removed schools from rankings for falsifying information, but these schools claim to not have known about the admissions cheating.

 

We shall see. I think it will depend on what is discovered and who the players were. My interpretation so far is this was a fraud orchestrated on these colleges, by an outside entity and bribing of specific employees, that shouldn’t shake things up too much.

 

"The only difference that I can see is that this is relatively low-level employees (the Stanford sailing coach for instance) who are subverting the published merit-based admissions system, instead of the university's top administrators doing it as a matter of often unstated admissions policy. So once again, it's all about a little-guy intruding into the big-guys' prerogatives and then taking the fall for that hubis and going to jail for it."

This is just so astonishing to me. It's just a case of not paying the right piper. Smack. That'll learn em.

 

The difference is that donations to the school are legal. The money is often used to build and improve facilities and to fund scholarships and grants. It's unethical to admit a kid because his or her parent donated, but it's not illegal.

The payments to the coaches were pocketed by the coaches, and some of the parents illegally claimed the payments as donations to a non-profit.

 

Exactly, they didn't do the bribing through the proper, traditional, channels - and that a low level "employee" was the benefactor of the bribe instead of the college (controlled optics) they're not having it.

 

No one really cares any more but all those rich parents . . . yeah they're all pleading guilty.

https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-felicity-huffman-college-admissions-scandal-20190408-story.html

 

Another article I saw was saying that even with the guilty pleas they are looking for jail time, at least for her. It will be interesting to see how it all ends up.

 

that's a relatively high admissions fee

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/us/yusi-molly-zhao-china-stanford.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Feducation&action=click&contentCollection=education&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=3&pgtype=sectionfront

 

exuberant amounts of money? I think you mean exorbitant amounts of money.

 

No one should be surprised by dirty money in education. Almost all dictators and and their cronies have their children in these exclusive institutions. It is big business.

 

One small example. Gadaffi paid £1.5m to LSE for his earned faux PhD in Economics.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1361358/Gaddafis-son-1-5m-London-School-Economics-embarrasses-chief-Howard-Davies.html

 

https://thefrisky.com/trump-family-educational-background/

 

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