41 College Admissions Lies That Were So Dumb They Made Officers Stop In Their Tracks

A student fabricated a story about helping raise awareness of a disability in school because his best friend had that disability. There was a student with that disability in class, but he wasn't the student's best friend, and there was never any awareness campaign. I was also skeptical about some of the student's other ECs, like having invented something oddly similar to an existing product and helping thousands of underprivileged people with two separate non-profit initiatives. After I refused to help him with essays that I knew made false claims and he "fired" me, I did some research. It turned out that the website the student set up about his non-profits used stock photos and old pictures from another website as examples of the people the initiatives had benefited.

Student A submitted a transcript with Student B’s name and work samples from Student C.

Also had a student submit unofficial transcripts with pen written over their grades. People review your applications. Y’all aren’t fooling AI.

If you haven’t watched the Varsity Blues scandal documentary on Netflix, I highly recommend it. These kids lied about wild stuff. The one that eventually broke the case wide open was one kid saying he did varsity crew for 4 years at high school. His high school didn’t have a crew team… AO thought his app was suspicious, called counselor to confirm.

It’s not hard to see through most “non-profits.” Perhaps not lying, per se, but if your website looks like a standard Squarespace site or has 10 officers who are all college seniors….the BS detector is going off.

I suppose this is a form of lying but I am "catching" more parents applying to our campus for their child; some activating their childʻs email account (and using it); and because parents have access to their childʻs college account, have accepted loans under their childʻs name.

I used to be an AO and the one that is most common was when a student would say they had no disciplinary history but the counselor letter would say or imply otherwise.

Not an AO, but I work with families as an IEC. A blatantly faked part of an application I've seen is an essay draft where every period in the sentence was followed by **two spaces**... that's what the older generation (i.e. parents) was taught with typing. A relic of the typewriter and early word processing (who calls it that anymore) days. Having seen previous examples of the student's actual writing to compare with, it was pretty obvious that the parent had more than a heavy hand in that draft. We stopped working together after I gently called them out on it and warned them. They got very defensive lol.

An applicant who put down "University Donor" on their activities list, indicating they donated $100 to the university. Do they think we don't have access to this database? Even if it was true (which it wasn't), definitely don't put that on the activities list.

TL;DR- Many “Prophets” coming in proclaiming to be on mission from God to deliver new books of the Bible to my wife.

My wife was an admissions counselor for a small, well-known Bible college in downtown Chicago. She got tons of crazy applications. Quite a few came in from people proclaiming things like, “I’m the Prophet Robert and I’ve been given a prophecy and written them down. I need this degree to get this added to the Bible.”

One particular time she was at work and it was towards the end of the day so most had already gone home. Well, they had a “walk-in” prospective student come to the office and wanted to meet with an admissions counselor. My wife was the only one left for the day so she went into a fairly small conference room to speak about any questions he might have about the school and how to go about the application process. This man was a middle-aged male who didn’t look out of the ordinary. About 10 minutes into their meeting this guy starts slowly going off the rails about his “testimony” (life story) even though my wife never asked for it. He starts talking about how God had been giving him visions for years of things he needed to accomplish while on earth. Apparently a small bible degree was one on a small list of things needed. My wife then sees through the window on the door behind the man a few public safety officers come in and speaking to the secretary. They then interrupt their meeting and escort the main off campus. Before he left he left a big pile of handwritten papers that were “new books of the Bible” that needed to be added.

Apparently he was on their “red flag list” because he had done this many times for about 20 years, including making extreme death threats to their counselors for not letting him into the school and once even attacked a student employee.

This is one of a long list of crazies that contact her. She has a folder of crazy emails that were too hilarious to delete from this earth.

We do online interview with overseas applicants. One time there was a girl from China applying for our postgraduate programme, and she looked completely different from the passport photo she sent us. We asked her questions like where she studied her bachelor degree...She gave us answer that wasn't consistent with the information on the application form.

We can't confirm but we believed she was working for some study abroad agency and she recited the personal information of another client. Those are popular in China.

My friend wrote one about how he invented penicillin. He got accepted...

I had a student who never had their application matched up with their other materials (test scores, transcripts, etc.) because the social security numbers didn't match. That's because their mother had filled out the application and written in her SSN instead.

GPA or SAT scores. Obvious to look up real scores.

Lying about your race/ethnicity seems to be a really popular one.

I know several people who are 1/16th Cuban or something and mark themselves as Hispanic. It might not be a blatant lie, but it’s obviously deceptive. And this fib could get you into a school that you never would have gotten into, or earn you a scholarship you never would have received if it weren’t for that act of dishonesty.

I think it’s wrong for college admissions and scholarships to penalize students based on race, but lying to get ahead is still immoral (and risky. and stupid.).

There was one student who had LORs where one was talking about how they were the absolute best student in the world, but the counselor's LOR destroyed the student, calling them the most immature student that cheats on exams. One person was lying on this application. I never looked into it because they weren't very competitive in the end, anyway.

I once saw a student who claimed over 1000 hours of volunteer work between Freshman and Junior year, all the while taking 8 AP classes and having an EC list of over 15 entries, each of which he was claiming he did every year in high school. It was obvious that somewhere in there, he was exaggerating. I suggested he cut back on some of the ECs he was listing because, even if they were true, having such a high number of volunteer hours as well as a high volume of time-consuming extracurriculars and a really rigorous academic schedule would definitely raise flags somewhere along the way.

When I was on a peer review committee for the admissions office as a student many years ago the most common response (I won’t call it a lie) that raised questions was a list of extracurricular activities that was so long that it led most of us to believe the applicant merely signed up and didn’t participate. Certainly there might have been superstars who could meaningfully contribute to 3 sports team, Model UN, Amnesty International, Marching Band and 8 clubs but it wasn’t likely, so we were forced to more closely evaluate the applicants other assertions.

As a related aside, references really were irrelevant. We used to joke that we could take all the reference letters and shuffle them and randomly put them in any applicants folder because they were almost completely identical. References that stood out were a rarity

Rather long winded, but stick to listing activities you have a real passion for and can describe its importance to you - why did you love fencing, why couldn’t you wait until the next debate. Reality and passion land you in the admit pile of applications

I think some of the worst I’ve seen are when they submit applications that were clearly AI and are addressed to another college. The college that they applied to isn’t even mentioned.

I’m not AO but I have a pretty funny story. The high school I went to had a pretty historic football program. The team consistently competed for a state tittle and would usually have at least one or two player from each class go D1. We had a Defensive back in my class with a few mid to lower tier D1 offers. The kid was pretty athletic but duper lazy and a horrible student, to the point where he was almost academically ineligible from playing sports every year of high school. Then all of a sudden the summer before his senior year he commits to the Naval academy. Everyone was shocked because Navy is both a much bigger more competitive program than all of his previous offers, and a school that historically is much less willing to compromise their academic standards for sport recruits than other schools.


Turns out he had photo shopped a transcript and sent it to the coach. Obviously when he had to actually officially apply to the school he was found out, and had his offer pulled. By that point all of his previous offers had moved on, and he ended up having play for a random JUCO.

That they were [not] dead. The mom was still in denial and sent out a ton of applications.

filledwithgonorrhea:
This seems like a good way to get into a college. Write essay saying you're dead. College "accepts" student out of pity because it's not like they can actually attend.