Since the Adam Wheeler story has stalled, I've been unfortunately reduced to reading the comments to the articles (which I realize is always a bad decision), and I don't understand the people posting about how shocked they are that Harvard doesn't perform background checks on all its applicants. Do they not realize that more than 30,000 people apply there every year? They'd have to hire a second admissions office to run background checks on all of them, especially the kind that would be necessary to filter out frauds like this--contacting all their schools for enrollment and transcript verification, calling their letter writers, checking all their writing for plagiarism.
And it's no big revelation to point that "it's on them" if they fail to catch one of these louts. No one is saying it's a national security emergency. "Blame Harvard" has limited truth to it--Harvard evidently attracts more such louts than, say, Chicago, where I don't recall a single such fraud being unearthed in my time there. Maybe its own culture transforms even its honest students into fraud-like beings; I don't know. But somehow I doubt that they're all sitting around doctoring their transcripts as you read this. (Though maybe they are!)
Opposite the Harvard resentment position stands the impossibility of fault position, which does great credit to the person who takes it since it demonstrates his compassion and elevation above the fray. Such a person expresses no indignation over douchebags taking for free what he had to work for; he is too morally advanced for petty resentment. For example, the anonymous professor in the Globe article: "There’s something that’s pathological there. And it’s something that seems to me that needs care and clinical treatment, rather than incarceration." All this guy needed was more hugs! Prestige-seeking is a disease; look for it in the next edition of the DSM.
Taken together, these approaches provide a really good outline for a solution to the problem of imposters. Basically, we should just watch everyone all the time starting at birth and keep all their school, work, and personal records in a central registry from which a college application can be automatically compiled by computers. Then, when we discover irregularities in their behavior (which will happen quickly because of the constant surveillance), we will refer them immediately to clinical treatment before anyone's aesthetically displeasing indignation can be aroused to start unjustly blaming people for pathologies they clearly cannot control. Plus, with so many people being treated for irregularities, the stigma might diminish. I think this is a good plan to address the fraud problem. The only difficulty is if at some point a really cunning super-fraud appears who manages to access the central registry of all personal data on everyone. Then we might experience a system malfunction.
UPDATE: New article, same comments. "I wonder if Harvard will ever come clean about how its admissions personnel fell for this guy's scam. And I wonder if Harvard will apologize to all the deserving applicants whose applications were rejected in favor of phony ones." No peeps, it won't. Not the point. Plz stop crying over your college rejections and imagining that you want to live in a world where no such fraud could ever occur. Yes, it's too bad they let this douchebag in, but they did catch him before he got out. So, hooray for justice.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
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4 comments:
I do remember a kid at Chicago who lived in his friend's dorm room for a quarter, took lots of hard science and math classes, and then was accepted to the college the next quarter. He said he'd been working as a bartender in Florida, and nobody seemed to mind, while he was squatting, that he wasn't a student. That's sort of the opposite of the fraud phenomenon, of course.
"Basically, we should just watch everyone all the time starting at birth and keep all their school, work, and personal records in a central registry from which a college application can be automatically compiled by computers."
They do this in China at a slightly lower level of technology. It works out well until the local party chief decides his son should get into Peking University using your high school grades.
lance: I don't think it's fraud unless he claimed to be someone he wasn't, like an enrolled student, or an extra-terrestrial.
Caelius: I thought of China while writing this. But their system seems to easy for sub-super-frauds to manipulate. More tech, I say.
China is also pretty well known for academic fraud when people apply to study in other countries. The best example is with TOFL exams, where there's lots of reason to worry about whether the person who shows up for a grad program will be the same person who took the test, for example.
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