Unacceptable by Melissa Korn & Jennifer Levitz

Author:Melissa Korn & Jennifer Levitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-07-20T16:00:00+00:00

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OCCASIONALLY, UNIVERSITY OFFICIALS have caught falsehoods. Even more rarely, admissions officers are the ones who find the lies, and more unlikely still is it for those lies to lead to criminal charges. It’s almost an accident when that happens, given how much trust, and how little verification, there is in the college admissions system.

Yale once uncovered a scam only because of a messy split between a student and his ex-boyfriend.

The ex told a Yale administrator he knew Akash Maharaj had lied about his age and identity on his transfer application, and school officials began to dig deeper.

Officials tried to verify his age, but couldn’t. They found that the dates he claimed to have attended Columbia, from which he transferred, didn’t make sense or match what Columbia had on record, and his transcript and recommendation letter he’d submitted were falsified. The paperwork also didn’t mention NYU or St. John’s University, other schools he had attended.

Maharaj pleaded guilty to larceny in 2008.

Around the time Yale booted Maharaj in 2007, Harvard admitted Adam Wheeler. He said he was a sophomore transfer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who’d earned near-perfect marks at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts; taken sixteen AP exams; and scored a perfect 1600 on the SAT and 800s on five SAT subject tests.

He was a stellar student at Harvard. But in 2009, administrators stumbled on myriad whoppers he told when he applied for Rhodes and Fulbright scholarships. They recognized his essay was plagiarized and summoned him for questioning. They then investigated, and everything began to unravel.

Wheeler had been a fine student at a public high school in Delaware. He didn’t attend MIT, but rather had gone to Bowdoin College (using cribbed Harvard admission essays for those earlier applications) before being suspended for academic dishonesty. He copied writings from Harvard’s own professors for his transfer application, and his recommendation letters were bogus. The source for much of his prose was a book of “successful” personal statements that had earned past applicants offers of admission to Harvard, published by the student newspaper. He also pulled from admissions guides like Rock Hard Apps.

A quick Google search and basic familiarity with the course requirements and grading methods at the various schools—too many courses listed one year, conflicting lines about where he was, when—should’ve busted Wheeler’s plan a few times over. But nobody caught on until after he was already admitted. Rather than stick around for his punishment, Wheeler left Harvard and applied for transfer to yet more prestigious schools. Stanford admitted him, before learning of his legal troubles and lies.

Wheeler was charged in 2010 with multiple counts of larceny and identity fraud related to his admission to Harvard and the thousands of dollars in grants and awards won under false pretenses. He took a plea, got ten years of probation, and had to pay back the more than $45,000 he’d gotten from Harvard, then violated his probation by claiming on an internship application that he’d studied at Harvard.

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