Feds uncover large-scale college entrance exam cheating plot

[QDOG5]

A quick google search says they are basically a tie on admission standards. My apologies to any Bruins out there. I'm pretty sure Bill Walton reads the Boneyard.

 

[BigErnMcCracken]

I always thought UCLA was higher rated and harder to get into than USC.

Ratings seem to be fairly subjective. UCLA also has about 12k more undergrads. My sense from living out here for a decade or so is that UCLA is considered academically more rigorous, a UCLA degree travels better outside of the state of California, but the USC alumni network is more formidable in-state.

 

[UconnU]

My brother went to USD. He was a good student, not great, surprised that someone needed to be bribed to get in there. Their acceptance rate is well north of 50%.

 

[upstater]

My brother went to USD. He was a good student, not great, surprised that someone needed to be bribed to get in there. Their acceptance rate is well north of 50%.

USD or Cal San Diego? Cal SD is a lot more stringent than that.

 

[whaler11]

Honestly as someone who is <10 years removed from this game, the thing I've realized is that once you reach a certain threshold of school "quality", all that really matters is how well you do when you're there. Sure, a 3.0 at MIT is perceived much more favorably than the same at UConn, but by and large you control your own fate. Now, that first job out of school might not be "elite", like Goldman or Mckinsey by nature of them only hiring from a select few schools, but 1) if you aren't a status-seeking tool you can totally find quality jobs if you did well in college (in the right major and 2) if you did well in undergrad you can then get into these prestigious places for grad school and just saved a bunch of money and stress.

as someone who works with mckinsey constantly... its funny to think they are some big landing spot for the elite

its like working with robots who say nothing but ‘does that resonate with you’

yes this workflow document is really resonating... i feel it in my soul

 

[auggie22]

as someone who works with mckinsey constantly... its funny to think they are some big landing spot for the elite

its like working with robots who say nothing but ‘does that resonate with you’

yes this workflow document is really resonating... i feel it in my soul

This was funny, and I normally don’t think the synthesis step is a laughing matter.

 

[UconnU]

USD or Cal San Diego? Cal SD is a lot more stringent than that.

University of San Diego.

 

[J187Money]

We may sidetrack this thread, but I've come to agree with you. In fact, I think that kids will do fine at a "good school" (non-elite) even with specific intentions you mentioned in your post. I went to two good, not elite, public universities. It may have been a bit harder, but I've done fine and had opportunities to do even better had I wanted. Some of my worst employees have gone to elite schools.

I should qualify what I meant by "good schools." I was being a bit dramatic. I was really referring to elite schools. I am surprised how tough schools have gotten across the board. It seems to have trickled down from the elite to other schools that I'm shocked have become so difficult to get into.

I, like many parents, started by wanting my kids to get into an elite school. I wanted the best for them, and I'm sure some of it was my pride/ego. I'd still love for that to happen, if it works out for them. I'm not going to stop them from trying to do their best, and I'll prod them if I don't feel they are working hard enough, but I won't get obsessed and I don't want them to work themselves into oblivion. I have friends that disagree with me. They are driving their kids hard. It's costing them a lot of money and I hope their kids don't burn out.

I was a top student - and almost everyone I knew went Ivy or equivalent. With my grades/scores/etc - I could have done the same - but finances dictated that I did not. I went to UCONN under duress. And it didn't hurt me at all. I ultimately got an Ivy league MBA - but what I learned is that if you get good grades at any good school you can get a good job - and then it is on you to perform. I also work in NYC with lots of people that are pressing their kids / spending $40K/year on private high schools etc and I'm just choosing not to play. My kids go to public school and I've basically told them that I will pay for college as long as I see the value there. My older son got into UCONN. He wanted to run and ended up going to a private school outside Boston. He also got $25K/year in academic scholarships - so I said fine - net it costs me about the same as UCONN or maybe a little more. He is super happy, even though it is objectively a "worse" school than UCONN. But his grades are great and he is happy and he loves running so it is a win/win. And if you told me that I would be sending him to a private catholic d3 school I would have bet the farm against it, and here we are.

There are exceptions, but generally people end up where they are supposed to be. Smart, driven people will be successful no matter where they go to school - or even if they don't go to school at all.

 

[J187Money]

Honestly as someone who is <10 years removed from this game, the thing I've realized is that once you reach a certain threshold of school "quality", all that really matters is how well you do when you're there. Sure, a 3.0 at MIT is perceived much more favorably than the same at UConn, but by and large you control your own fate. Now, that first job out of school might not be "elite", like Goldman or Mckinsey by nature of them only hiring from a select few schools, but 1) if you aren't a status-seeking tool you can totally find quality jobs if you did well in college (in the right major and 2) if you did well in undergrad you can then get into these prestigious places for grad school and just saved a bunch of money and stress.

Agree 100%. My 2nd job was Goldman. Which of course made it super easy for me to get into a Ivy League MBA program. The key is studying something useful and getting a good 1st job. If you do good work at a quality organization you can go anywhere from there.

 

[CL82]

Umm the Naval Academy (and all service academies) are totally tuition free...

Kind of tough to nail that down without the required nomination letter from a congressman, senator or the VP.

 

[Waquoit]

One these brats said, “I don’t know how much of school I’m going to attend... “But I do want the experience of game days, partying…” She paused. “I don’t really care about school, as you guys all know.”

 

[businesslawyer]

The Willkie Farr partner lives in Greenwich. I think I've spoken to him over the phone a few times over the years, and I know plenty of people who know him.

Agree 100%. My 2nd job was Goldman. Which of course made it super easy for me to get into a Ivy League MBA program. The key is studying something useful and getting a good 1st job. If you do good work at a quality organization you can go anywhere from there.

When we hire, once you've been working a few years we're much less focused on your academics and more focused on what you've been doing in the workplace. I don't think we're alone in that.

 

[superjohn]

 

[Engineer90]

This has little to do with being a legacy. It is more about buying your way into a coveted spot whether legacy or not. It is coveted for several reasons. First, you have the network. Some schools simply have a better network to wealth and power. Second, you have ego. There are a lot of parents who are projecting their desire for achievement onto their kids. They like to brag about their kids at dinner parties and so on. It is the same mentality that drives parents to behave like psychos at sports. Sometimes it is the same parent. Sometimes the parent only rides their kid to succeed at school and sometimes it is only in sports. Whatever the combination, the result is the same, if my kid succeeds then I am a successful parent. For those with an insatiable need for validation, it just goes on and on. Little league today, spelling bee tomorrow, high school class rank, college admissions, graduate school...

Some people are calling for admissions to move to a straight meritocracy. But a straight meritocracy won't stop this. People will just cheat on what they need to cheat on. SAT cheating will just get worse. Prep schools that hand out As will get worse. We will have fake prep schools like we now have fake schools that are just there to get athletes qualified for sports.

And what about the damage that Tiger parents are doing to their kids? That will only get worse as well with a straight meritocracy. Anxiety and depression in colleges is rising rapidly. Kids seeking counseling is rising rapidly. Their parents are riding them like racehorses from a very young age. The parents are robbing their kids of a normal childhood so they can study more and do better on the spelling bee or practice more and win music competitions or spend ungodly hours working with Olympic coaches so they can become good enough to get recruited to top colleges. It is great for the ones that achieve their parent's goals but what happens to the ones that don't? Train wreck.

You can't just focus on the cheaters to fix this very broken system. You have to look at the bigger picture and that includes the abusive tiger parents. The bigger problem here is that *people with a particular political ideology* broke the original Holistic admissions system. Yes, the original one was evil in that it was created to address "The Jewish Problem" at Princeton. But, really, it makes sense to include soft skills along with SAT scores and grades. Emotional intelligence matters. Being able to communicate matters. Being able to operate as part of a team matters. Being able to lead matters. The problem is that none of those things matter to admissions anymore. They now say they want "pointed applicants", not well rounded applicants. So long as you meet a surprisingly low bar for everything else, you just need to be noteworthy in one of the areas they deem worthy. Being a minority gets you in. Being a recruited athlete gets you in. Being associated with a wealthy donor gets you in. It is much easier, and much more tempting, to game a system where one thing can get you in so long as you meet the minimum requirements in the other categories.

 

[Chuck]

@Engineer90, I don’t disagree with many of the problems that you point out, just your premise that a meritocracy will make it worse. Loughlin’s Idiot daughter’s spot will go to the next applicant that worked hard but got denied. If there are more merit-based spots, there may be less need to be as crazy competitive.

I went to law school with a guy that readily admitted that he was for affirmative action because it was the only way legacy acceptance would work. His family went to Penn for generations. He felt zero guilt that he was significantly less qualified than people that got denied.

 

[uconnfan68]

I solved my college funding problem when my daughters were 11 and 12 years old.

I told them they didn't have to do their homework anymore.

Ha! I used to tell my baby she had to win a scholarship while I was walking her at night through the teething. She did.

 

[uconnfan68]

I always thought UCLA was higher rated and harder to get into than USC.

Almost all the Cal public’s are ahead of private USC.

 

[pj]

6 million? How dumb was the kid? Can't you just build a building on campus with your name on it for that amount?

Can't you buy something more valuable than a college degree, like, say, $6 million?

 

[huskymedic]

Why one arrest in college admissions scandal could have widespread impact in sports

>>Riddell has been charged with two counts of fraud for allegedly conspiring with Singer for the past eight years to secretly take SAT and ACT exams in place of actual students or replace students’ answers with those of his own. Department of Justice documents appear to identify Riddell as a cooperating witness who has been working with the government since February in exchange for leniency.

If Riddell has actually been taking standardized tests for Singer’s clients in return for thousands of dollars, it raises the question of whether he has also provided the same service for IMG athletes seeking to meet minimum NCAA academic requirements. Riddell’s now-deleted bio on IMG’s website said he began working for the school in 2006 and “assisted thousands of students in gaining admission to top American universities such as Stanford, Duke, Columbia, Dartmouth College, the University of Chicago and others.”<<

>>It’s difficult to ascertain which of the academy’s athletes worked closely with Riddell, himself an IMG grad who played Division I tennis at Harvard from 2000-04. IMG regularly produces Division I athletes in numerous sports, from football, to basketball, to baseball, to tennis.

Five of the top 60 basketball prospects in the 2019 Rivals rankings attend IMG Academy: Jeremiah Robinson-Earl (Villanova), Josh Green (Arizona), Armando Bacot (North Carolina), Terrence Shannon (Texas Tech) and Lester Quinones (undecided). IMG also boasts three of the top 10 football prospects in the Class of 2019: Georgia-bound linebacker Nolan Smith and Alabama-bound running back Trey Sanders and offensive lineman Evan Neal.

In the hours since the Department of Justice disclosed its findings, no colleges have announced plans to investigate the validity of test scores attained by former IMG athletes. Miami, Florida State and Alabama are among the universities with at least a handful of IMG graduates on their football teams.<<

 

[intlzncster]

If Riddell has actually been taking standardized tests for Singer’s clients in return for thousands of dollars, it raises the question of whether he has also provided the same service for IMG athletes seeking to meet minimum NCAA academic requirements. Riddell’s now-deleted bio on IMG’s website said he began working for the school in 2006 and “assisted thousands of students in gaining admission to top American universities such as Stanford, Duke, Columbia, Dartmouth College, the University of Chicago and others.”<<

In the hours since the Department of Justice disclosed its findings, no colleges have announced plans to investigate the validity of test scores attained by former IMG athletes. Miami, Florida State and Alabama are among the universities with at least a handful of IMG graduates on their football teams.<<

Uh, ya think? That said, they aren't going to do anything about past athletes. How are they going to prove it at this point? Unless Riddell divulges exactly what he did for whom with regards to SATs.

I don't know what kind of records he's kept though.

 

[huskymedic]

Uh, ya think? That said, they aren't going to do anything about past athletes. How are they going to prove it at this point? Unless Riddell divulges exactly what he did for whom with regards to SATs.

I don't know what kind of records he's kept though.

I guess time will tell...

>>Department of Justice documents appear to identify Riddell as a cooperating witness who has been working with the government since February in exchange for leniency.<<

 

[Jaker]

Rich people doing what rich people do.

 

[huskymedic]

>>Fox is widely known across the AAU and college basketball world. Now that the 62-year-old hoops gadfly has been charged with conspiracy to commit racketeering, his murky role within the sport is under scrutiny.

"He was a known person," said Sonny Vaccaro, a Godfather of the sneaker business, "but it was unknown exactly what he did."

The FBI says it knows one thing Fox did: facilitating academic fraud as a middleman funneling bribes from the head of a shady college-prep company in California to a standardized test administrator in Houston and to the tennis coach at the University of Texas. In the U.S. Attorney's indictment that was unsealed Tuesday, Fox is alleged to have funneled money from William "Rick" Singer to Lisa "Niki" Williams to arrange for students to earn sufficiently high marks on the ACT to be admitted to elite universities.<<

 

[intlzncster]

>>Fox is widely known across the AAU and college basketball world. Now that the 62-year-old hoops gadfly has been charged with conspiracy to commit racketeering, his murky role within the sport is under scrutiny.

"He was a known person," said Sonny Vaccaro, a Godfather of the sneaker business, "but it was unknown exactly what he did."

The FBI says it knows one thing Fox did: facilitating academic fraud as a middleman funneling bribes from the head of a shady college-prep company in California to a standardized test administrator in Houston and to the tennis coach at the University of Texas. In the U.S. Attorney's indictment that was unsealed Tuesday, Fox is alleged to have funneled money from William "Rick" Singer to Lisa "Niki" Williams to arrange for students to earn sufficiently high marks on the ACT to be admitted to elite universities.<<

You've convinced me.

 

[AZHuskiePop]

Kind of tough to nail that down without the required nomination letter from a congressman, senator or the VP.

Actually you are paid to go to the service academies. I think it increases by your class
It’s modest and some expenses are deducted by they are technically government employees

 

[Engineer90]

@Engineer90, I don’t disagree with many of the problems that you point out, just your premise that a meritocracy will make it worse. Loughlin’s Idiot daughter’s spot will go to the next applicant that worked hard but got denied. If there are more merit-based spots, there may be less need to be as crazy competitive.

I went to law school with a guy that readily admitted that he was for affirmative action because it was the only way legacy acceptance would work. His family went to Penn for generations. He felt zero guilt that he was significantly less qualified than people that got denied.

I understand your point 100%. I lean that way myself. However, I also know that, if this were only about grades, class rank and SAT scores, it would make it even easier for people like Loughlin to cheat the system. Then they would only need to do one illegal thing which is to cheat on the SAT. Right now, a high SAT and class rank is not enough to get you into these schools. Trust me, I know as we are less than 1 year removed from this crappy process. And it isn't hard to cheat on the SAT. My son knows some international students at his Ivy school and he said that he has been told that cheating is rampant in China. Those kids are flooding the application process and the numbers are climbing exponentially over time. That is what is driving down the acceptance rates at these schools. It isn't just the common app. That is a minor factor. The massive increase in applications is primarily due to the increase in international student applications. Supposedly that is leveling off finally. We shall see. Regardless, there are massive numbers of kids that have cheated on their SAT applying to these schools every year. And not only does that make these merit factors questionable but it also overloads the admissions committees. That overload plus their insatiable desire to virtue signal through social justice admissions policies have driven them to minimize the impact of both the merit factors and the personal factors. Yes, they are both considered but, really, it is all about having something noteworthy in your application. Basically, can they brag about you in their "incoming class profile"? Can they include you in their numbers for underrepresented minority students or first generation students or poor students? If not, are you a recruited athlete? If not, are you nationally ranked or recognized in some way in something? If none of these, you had better know a big donor or hire a consultant to craft the perfect application with what you do have and it better include extremely high merit numbers because that is the pool you are left in.

 

[Kenny11]

This is bad but its nothing compared to what Mr. Madison did to make sure Billy even passed grammar school the first time around.

 

[superjohn]

Lori Loughlin's daughter on spring break on USC official's yacht when college bribery scandal broke | Daily Mail Online

 

[BlueDogs]

The system is broken top to bottom with lots perverse incentives that have little to do with academic merit. This includes athletics, big donors, legacy and affirmative action. The concept of hard work and academic achievement being a path to admission is pretty much dead with many aptly qualified kids being rejected.

 

[upstater]

This has little to do with being a legacy. It is more about buying your way into a coveted spot whether legacy or not. It is coveted for several reasons. First, you have the network. Some schools simply have a better network to wealth and power. Second, you have ego. There are a lot of parents who are projecting their desire for achievement onto their kids. They like to brag about their kids at dinner parties and so on. It is the same mentality that drives parents to behave like psychos at sports. Sometimes it is the same parent. Sometimes the parent only rides their kid to succeed at school and sometimes it is only in sports. Whatever the combination, the result is the same, if my kid succeeds then I am a successful parent. For those with an insatiable need for validation, it just goes on and on. Little league today, spelling bee tomorrow, high school class rank, college admissions, graduate school...

Some people are calling for admissions to move to a straight meritocracy. But a straight meritocracy won't stop this. People will just cheat on what they need to cheat on. SAT cheating will just get worse. Prep schools that hand out As will get worse. We will have fake prep schools like we now have fake schools that are just there to get athletes qualified for sports.

And what about the damage that Tiger parents are doing to their kids? That will only get worse as well with a straight meritocracy. Anxiety and depression in colleges is rising rapidly. Kids seeking counseling is rising rapidly. Their parents are riding them like racehorses from a very young age. The parents are robbing their kids of a normal childhood so they can study more and do better on the spelling bee or practice more and win music competitions or spend ungodly hours working with Olympic coaches so they can become good enough to get recruited to top colleges. It is great for the ones that achieve their parent's goals but what happens to the ones that don't? Train wreck.

You can't just focus on the cheaters to fix this very broken system. You have to look at the bigger picture and that includes the abusive tiger parents. The bigger problem here is that *people with a particular political ideology* broke the original Holistic admissions system. Yes, the original one was evil in that it was created to address "The Jewish Problem" at Princeton. But, really, it makes sense to include soft skills along with SAT scores and grades. Emotional intelligence matters. Being able to communicate matters. Being able to operate as part of a team matters. Being able to lead matters. The problem is that none of those things matter to admissions anymore. They now say they want "pointed applicants", not well rounded applicants. So long as you meet a surprisingly low bar for everything else, you just need to be noteworthy in one of the areas they deem worthy. Being a minority gets you in. Being a recruited athlete gets you in. Being associated with a wealthy donor gets you in. It is much easier, and much more tempting, to game a system where one thing can get you in so long as you meet the minimum requirements in the other categories.

People tend to forget that most of these are private schools that comprise only 15% of the total market.

This is significant because tuition costs at private schools usually double over the actual expenditure per student, so that a significant part of the private institution's budget goes to redistributing the excess tuition money toward students who demonstrate need.

In other words, the elite colleges that are a tier below the Ivy's rely on legacies to pay full freight. And there are enough of them with middling scores that you don't need to admit wealthy children who have done no work at all to get there. That's why these parents had to fudge SAT scores etc.

That is far different than scamming