MARIST COLLEGE, Poughkeepsie, New York — Two months ago, the SAT exam was canceled for the entire country of South Korea. Earlier this year, high school senior Suzy Weiss wondered aloud, in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, whether she shouldn’t have fabricated her demographic background in order to curry favor with selective colleges. In Thailand the mischief that Ms. Weiss merely pondered is, as it turns out, common practice.
In my dual careers as a teacher and urban planner, I’ve attended more conferences than I could possibly count. That means that I’ve listened to more than my share of panel discussions (I’ve even moderated a few), and I know that truly compelling panel discussions can reach unicorn-levels of rarity. So at the conference of the Overseas Association for College Admissions (OACAC) at Marist College, I chose my sessions carefully.
Attending two sessions on ethics was, however, a no-brainer.
Ethics in the Application Process
The first, organized by Cathy Curtis of the International School of Bangkok, Robin Worth of Harvard University, Rebecca Mano of EducationUSA, Daniel Grayson of Tufts University, Ffiona Rees of UCLA, and UK-based independent counselor Eileen Penman discussed the ethics of the application process itself. They presented fascinating case studies of subtle, but meaty, quandaries that arose in students’ applications:
- A student had applied to a prestigious U.S. university only so that he could use the acceptance as leverage with a university in his/her home country.
- Another wanted to back out of an Early Decision agreement when she realized that she had a chance of getting into an even more selective university in the regular round.
- A university received an anonymous email accusing an admitted student of having assaulted one of his high school classmates.
These case studies inspired vigorous discussion among panelists and audience members (a rarity in panel discussions!) because each of them included ambiguities that students, counselors, and admissions officers alike had to wrestle with. Ought a university heed an anonymous accusation? Was the counselor at fault for supporting the regular-round application of a student who’d been admitted ED? May a student in good conscience seek acceptance at a school that he would never attend?
What was most interesting about these discussions was their frankness. For instance, the college reps on the panel and in the audience made it very clear that they might cease to accept students from high schools where they believed that students and/or counselors were involved in shady behavior. In other words, reputation and trustworthiness can precede an applicant’s own virtues.
Ethics in Thailand
In Thailand, universities aren’t just worried about particular schools or counselors. There, the entire country is on notice.
The organizers of the panel “Thailand’s Fraudulent Apps” made it clear that they did not want to unduly pick on Thailand. Obviously, scandal, corruption, and cheating can take place anywhere, including, of course, at some of the finest high schools in the United States. But they proposed that application fraud was particularly rampant and, disturbingly, socially acceptable in a country where practices like low-level bribery are customary.
Jemison Foster, of Bangkok Patana School, John Carr of Keerapat International School, Joshua Russo of the tutoring firm Top Scholars, and Daniel Grayson of Tufts University discussed their firsthand experience with some desperate measures. Those measures included doctored application essays, eerily similar (and flattering) teacher recommendations, and entirely made-up extracurricular accomplishments. (Note to would-be scam artists: if you’re going to claim to create a documentary film about abortion, you might not want to claim that it’s posted on YouTube.)
Unlike in the first panel, there were few grey areas here. Everyone agreed that students were deliberately and unethically misleading their prospective colleges. Unfortunately, said each panelists, colleges all too often ignore, miss, or do not have the resources to confirm these transgressions. The same goes for the offenders’ college counselors.
Of course, the result is that many offenders — and we’ll never know who — gain admission to fantastic colleges and are thus rewarded for their fraud. Tufts’ Grayson insisted that colleges must acknowledge and take action against fraud, lest they become complicit in students’ shadiness. He noted one immutable truth of cheating: cheaters will only cheat when it works, and when it’s easier than it is to do the right thing. In Thailand, many students, often egged on by unscrupulous agents and/or demanding parents, believe that cheating is in fact the proper way to gain admission. Ironically, many students who could have genuinely improved themselves with minimal effort.
The panel became, in a sense, a call to arms. They encouraged universities to inspect Thai applications thoroughly, giving them no benefit of the doubt. And they called upon high school counselors to understand the gravity of the situation and not let their students get away with anything, even if students’ transgressions could give their schools a more impressive acceptance list. The extreme alternative is that those schools would end up with no acceptance lists at all.
And what about ArborBridge? Does standardized testing, and preparation therefor, present ethical quandaries? Of course they do. I will discuss ArborBridge’s ethical obligations in an upcoming blog post.
