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Comment by sjy | Hacker News Reader

Choosing to get a fake divorce so that you can game the system as much as possible isn't punishment; it's probably fraud. You could also choose to relax and let your children enjoy all the other benefits of a great upbringing, and accept that "the children of hardworking parents should be more likely to be admitted" isn't a design goal of the admissions system.

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Resisting an abusive and insanely overreaching government system is not 'fraud' morally and it probably won't be one legally.

The SAT is administered by College Board which is an entirely private institution.

The federally & state funded public Universities that will fall over each other to employ adversity scores as a pillar of their academic life, on the other hand... One can attempt to outsource responsibility from a legalistic perspective, but from a moral perspective one can't escape it.

That seems like quite a stretch to rationalize why a private entity making decisions about its internal processes is actually government mandated overreach.

If you don't lie it's not fraud. You can game metrics all you want, you can get divorced for any reason.

You can get married for any reason, but that doesn't stop certain perfectly true and legally valid marriages from being marriage fraud in immigration.

No it’s not fraud in the least. Nothing says I need to be married at all.

You said you're doing all this for the sake of your kids. What do you think they'll learn from you doing this?

If I had to guess, probably that:

1. remote_phone cares deeply about his children

2. in life there are many unjust and immoral systems, and that it's okay to subvert them

Do you think it was okay for Felicity Huffman et al to pay for their children's admission?

They are saying they will get a real divorce but just live together after.

It's not fraud to divorce. People can live whatever way they want. It is merely arbitraging a bad metric.

If this guy is going to insane lengths like this, he is probably gaming the system in other ways anyway.

If the guy is going to insane lengths like this, his kids probably have genuine non-economic adversity.

It could come down to a large scale societal prisoners dilemna. It’s gonna get ugly

You can't commit fraud against a secret metric. If the metric is public and official, then yeah, that's a fraud.

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