Harvard-Stanford admissions hoax becomes international scandal | Hacker News Reader

Harvard-Stanford admissions hoax becomes international scandal

washingtonpost.com

57 pointsilamont51 comments

This scandal blew up because one of her classmates posted a lengthy rant about her lies on a /r/askreddit thread. The post was widely shared on Korean media and was eventually picked up in the states, as you can see from the original link.

For closure, it appears school officials met with her and her parents and decided on expelling her.

The classmate deleted the post shortly afterward, but you can read a copy of it below.

[Archived Post] - https://archive.is/pYQeg

[Original Post] - http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/395g6c/what_is_th...

[Korean coverage, including forged admission letters] - http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2015/06/12/2015...

I found the original post entirely depressing and sad. I could never imagine putting my own children through the level of stress that would cause them to do this. I am glad to read the fathers reaction in that last link

"In a press release later on Friday morning, Sara's father, an executive at global online gaming company Nexon, apologized for causing a stir with the fabrication. "I'm responsible for all the mistakes and sorry not to have taken better care of this poor kid," he said. He promised to look after her better since she apparently suffered from extreme stress due to academic pressures. He allegedly had no idea that the story was false."

It's often the kids who put themselves through this pressure. I can't speak for all families, but I went to a Whitney HS, a southern california version of TJ, and the peer pressure is quite a lot stronger than what most parents say or do.

This isn't helped by an admissions process that seems to penalize Asian Americans due to their ethnicity.

From the development documented by her classmate, it seems like it started with a small lie about an extracurricular math activity that spiraled out of control when she tacked on one lie after another to convince others that she was accomplished. If people didn't call her out on the first lie and just ignored it, I wonder if she would have gone as far.

> “We celebrate the accomplishment of students who get into all eight Ivies,” said Brandon Kosatka, TJ’s director of student services. “That’s the bar, and our kids are shooting for that. They don’t like to be the second-best. If that’s the bar, then, yes, that creates anxiety for them.”

Jesus. That's borderline child abuse. These people understand their children can only go to one of those eight schools at a time, right?

Funny - I came to the comments with this exact same quote in my clipboard. I don't think it's child abuse, though, as both the parents and children are part of this world view which uses socially accepted norms for success as their primary metrics of worth. It's an extreme form of absolute submission to external motivation.

I think this comes from a culture of insecurity, addiction to simple success metrics, and maybe even a little intellectual laziness. Doing well in school isn't worthless, but it's perpendicular to learning to decide for yourself what your values are and in what direction you want to pull the world as you interact with it. At least in my experience, the latter is a lot more intellectually difficult (and satisfying) than learning a particular set of skills to solve a particular set of problems.

> Jesus. That's borderline child abuse. These people understand their children can only go to one of those eight schools at a time, right?

It's precisely the opposite. It's an acknowledgement that the Ivy League admissions process is completely broken, and it is a proper, rational response.

If I assume that my probability of admission is randomly 25% (probably not unreasonable), then I have a 10% probability of not being admitted to any of the 8 schools even if I am qualified.

As an admission process requires money and time, it's yet one more way that the poor are disadvantaged.

>admissions process is completely broken

Broken implies "should be fixed." I'm not sure how you fix an inherently competitive admissions process whether it's getting into Harvard or getting a job offer from $HOT_TECH_CO. You're always going to have an element of randomness unless you purely/primarily go the testing route, e.g. the civil service examination system of imperial China. Which has its own set of problems.

(BTW, to be clear, expectations that one must attend one of these schools or one's life is ruined are certainly misplaced. But given such expectations, I'm not sure what reasonable admissions system is going to do away with randomness. I think it's a good thing that admissions aren't purely based on SAT scores.)

As far as I'm concerned, it's not borderline. All five members of my immediate family attended various so-called tier 1 schools. Never once was I made to feel that an Ivy League admission was a required or expected achievement.

As for my time at such a school, I will say this. There are certainly more opportunities, but the average university is so brimming with amazing opportunities that the limiting factor is motivation, not quality of the institution. I suppose the old maxim, "You get out what you put in," applies here.

You're correct on the last part, but let's be honest for a second - for the HN crowd, I don't think the average school has the opportunities "we" want.

And what are the opportunities "we" want that aren't available at your average university?

Hackathons, easy access to industry. cutting edge and relevant research opportunities, motivated peer group with similar interests, etc.

My point was primarily that there isn't a huge gulf between an applicant's #1 school and #5 school. What I can find at Harvard/Yale/Princeton can mostly be found at UCLA or even major state schools.

This pressuring your kids with these expectations is crazy, because for even the best students, the Ivy admissions process is a crapshoot. And perhaps alleviating some of the pressure could even lead to increased performance due to lower stress levels.

US university admission is so weird, I think. Where I'm from, the only thing that counts is your grades. No subjective letter, having to know important people for letter of recommendation, no need to force yourself to play an instrument, do charity work, play a sport etc. without actually wanting to do it.

What are the pro's of doing it this way?

I'm guessing it's because they feel that grades are a poor indicator as to how well you will do at University, so they're fishing around for better things to go by.

I haven't looked at recent studies, but actually (normalized) grades and standard test scores are a pretty good indication of academic performance in university. If that was your only metric, you'd probably lean pretty heavily on those indicators. However, elite schools are--for better or worse--aiming for a mix of student backgrounds, interests, and experiences on the theory that this creates a richer learning environment than one that's solely optimized for conventional academic prowess.

It's probably also true to say that the Ivies and other top-flight, especially Eastern, liberal arts schools were historically more concerned with admitting "the right sort of people" than the most studious. So there never really was a history of an exclusively examination-based approach--though one can find Harvard admissions tests from the 1800s--e.g. http://www.businessinsider.com/harvard-entry-exam-2011-7

How hard it is to cheat or bribe to get these good grades?

How hard is to cheat or bribe to get the other requirements, too (recommendation letter, charity, etc.)?

I come from a country where grades are the main variable, so I'd like to have a view on how these additional requirements make the whole process more robust. Is it just for a quantitative reason (cheating on N > 1 requirements is more difficult than cheating on 1) or are they necessary to correctly identify good candidates?

Grades don't tell the entire picture as well. I've seen enough people with perfect grades working far less than perfect.

Yes I remember in the UK the older bother of a class mate got 3A's at A level (back when that was hard to do) and was by all accounts the cleverest student the school had.

Unfortuntly when he went to Uni he had a nervous break down.

This system was created to exclude Jews who were getting high test scores. The bigoted notion was that Jews could grind the books, but could not compete as well-rounded gentlemen. By making the process more subjective, elite universities could exclude Jews while denying that the process was anti-Semitic.

Do elite universities still feel threatened by hard-working up-and-coming minorities who might endanger their relaxed white-shoe, gentleman's-A lifestyle? (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/03/the-trut...) I'll leave that to you to figure out.

That's part of it, another is a desire to have 'wealthy' donors not just hard working students. And finally, while highly motivated students get better grades they are not actually smarter which is why high school valedictorian is poorly correlated with success in life. Where many motivated students get discouraged, a few smart student can get motivated when finally presented with a real challenge.

Ivy schools are selling a brand and they want to be able to point to politicians and CEO's not just well respected doctors etc. In the end Ivy's don't really provide anywhere close to the education required to justify their costs but they do provide some great branding.

>>>In the end Ivy's don't really provide anywhere close to the education required to justify their costs but they do provide some great branding.

You attend an Ivy for the prestige, the social signaling an Ivy degree provides, the unique job opportunities offered, and most importantly the networking.

The real learning at an Ivy is done outside the classroom... being exposed to people and social classes you wouldn't have otherwise, learning the social cues of the 1%, how life "really works", etc.

For the real elites, this process actually starts much earlier than Hahhhhvahhd. You should see what life is like at the old blue blood independent K-12s...

Grades rapidly become useless when all teachers have incentive to inflate them. The fear of random exclusion by an admissions committee (which is alleviated by the ability to apply to many schools) is replaced by the fear of random exclusion by a teacher who thinks that "teaching his kids a lesson," "giving them feedback," or "maintaining standards" is more important to their future than the grades he will give them (which is unavoidable and irreversible once encountered). Inevitably, too strong an emphasis on grades encourages kids to take only classes they know they can get As in, effectively forbidding them from pushing themselves, experimenting, or learning from the aforementioned group of "strict" teachers who definitely have something positive to offer even if they're in denial about the relative importance of grades vs what they have to teach. Simple workarounds like fixing the frequency distribution of grades aren't effective because the distribution of aptitude is far from uniform. Some classes of kids deserve to all get As; some classes deserve to all fail. If your system doesn't acknowledge this you incentivize people to shuffle their kids to avoid competition, negatively impacting the ability of smart kids to form groups, learn from other smart kids, and learn from the best teachers.

Standardized tests are much more evenhanded but not bias-free. Just as surely as an all-grades system forces grades upwards, an all-tests system forces uniformity on curricula. At the levels we are talking about, this almost certainly degrades their quality. If students pay for tests and the tests are administered by a company, tests incentivize a structure whereby students can pay for repeated chances at a test. Also, kids who have more time for preparation and money for tutors are put at an advantage.

Extracurriculars create another game with perverse incentives but they are almost certainly good for a child's physical and social development so ignoring them would arguably be worse as the opportunity cost would make participation inadvisable for "top" students. Meanwhile, extracurriculars certainly have something to offer the admissions process: contests with broad scope can serve as an alternative to standardized tests as a globally comparable measure. They also measure the much-ballyhooed "leadership skills" (which aren't nearly as easy to game as one might think; the truth comes out in the essays). When I was going through the process I wasn't convinced that leadership skills were important and this requirement chafed a bit. Now I suspect they are even more important than the admissions process gives them credit for and I can actually credit the whole process with doing me a bit of good.

The broad admissions system is far, far from perfect but the narrower alternatives certainly have plenty of their own problems.

I studied at Harvard some years ago and I wholeheartedly support the holistic admissions process. Good grades are a great predictor of your ability to get good grades, not much more than that.

As a nerdy Asian, if 50% of my classmates were nerdy Asians, my experience would have been much less fulfilling. Much of the education at college comes from the friends you meet along the way so a diverse, multifaceted class is an invaluable part of the experience. I have a friend who was an armed guerrilla against Iran and another friend who was forced into exile in Egypt after a coup in Sudan. These are the perspectives that expand a young 18-year-old's worldview. Both of them had a SAT score much lower than mine, but I would argue they deserved their spots at Harvard more than I did.

Why do you presume Asians are any more nerdy than others? It's one thing to be in favor of diversity of experience (it's great that you met such interesting people) and quite another thing to assume that Asian ethnicities are less likely to contribute such experiences to the university.

That second thing is called racism. (not saying you are racist, but your argument certainly justifies racism)

I wouldn't say I'm presuming Asians are nerdier. Since I'm a nerdy Asian, I can only speak to the type of people I know. What I meant is: "if I were in school with only people who were like myself."

So then, perhaps you'd want to replace

"As a nerdy Asian, if 50% of my classmates were nerdy Asians,"

with

"As a nerd, if 50% of my classmates were nerds,"

I'm one of those 'diverse' classmates I guess. Poor Iowa farm kid, got middling good grades (best in my class but that's not saying much). Couldn't afford anything without a full loan etc. But Stanford let me in, for no good reason. That was in 1981.

Unlike universities in most (all?) of the rest of the world, academic studies & grades are intentionally not the only mission within US schools. Extracurriculars, social clubs & sports are hugely important, to the point that selecting for "well rounded" success is something colleges try to do.

As others have stated, if it was based purely on grades it would be almost random. Grades are too easy to fake or inflate, and many high school students just coast through with straight As, whether they actually have a special aptitude for academics or not.

Diversity. Not in the racial sense, but in the "variety of people" sense. If you only use one admission factor, than all your students will be good at that factor. You get a school full of good test takers, to the exclusion of good musicians, or athletes, or whatever other skills are valued.

Ok, but I got into Stanford based on test-taking. Got 99% in math and English parts of the GRE. Stanford had a thing for that, back then.

My grades were not great because of ADD - didn't concentrate in HS or even my first 4 years very much, homework was spotty or absent, but boy could I take a test!

Systematic grade inflation across the country has made GPAs a poor indicator, and not all schools have the same grade systems.

Some schools even allow students to take AP/college level classes for bonus grade points. It's not fair to compare students getting a 4.5 (out of 4) grade points with a student from another school who can only get 3.8 for taking the same AP class with the same results.

What are the top universities in the world? That's the pros.

The supply of applicants has grown much faster than the number of top tier college places. Part is due to that the fraction of Americans applying to four year colleges has doubled from a quarter to a half in the past 40 years. And the number of international applicants has grown even faster than that. Add to to this the relative ease of applying to multiple colleges by computer in the 21st century. Plus the insecurity and trophy-hunting that makes people apply to 10,20 or more. I was personally lucky to get into my top two choices with Early Decision in December and never applied to a third one.

There's a lot of grade inflation, especially at the top level. I took 9 APs in high school, and they were, generally speaking, the easiest classes. Part of that is that, when you create a nationally-standardized curriculum, you have to water some of the content down. Part of that is a culture of not doing anything to jeopardize the student's admission prospects. The school's reputation is dependent on AP placement rate so they also had an incentive to keep kids in APs, and giving a B to a high-achieving student could provoke an angry response from the student or the parents.

Not to mention, there is no standardized grading system in the US. GPAs are nominally out of 4.0, but some schools pump those numbers by tacking .5 onto honors classes and 1.0 onto AP. At other schools its 1.0 and 2.0. Other schools don't have APs at all, or don't offer a bump for high-level courses. Who is the "better student?" The one who has a 4.43 at a school where there are no APs and honors is a .5 bump, or the student with a 5.28 at a school that offers 19 APs and gives a 2.0 bump? It's ludicrous.

The subjective measures colleges use actually started as a veil to enable racism in the 1920s. It gave them cover to deny anyone they wanted on the basis of intangible factors. This ended up hurting Jews the most. It has stuck around because it benefits the rich. Families with money to throw around can make their student look more desirable. Family connections can get you a prestigious internship with a senator. A few thousand dollars can get the student a spot on a "research trip" to Costa Rica. Another few thousand and you can get a book of your photography listed on Amazon. I go to what many would consider an "elite" school and all these examples come from people I know.

College admissions in the US is incredibly strange and arduous, and I'm dreading the day they my kids have to endure it. I would almost prefer they became plumbers or something...

>Not to mention, there is no standardized grading system in the US. GPAs are nominally out of 4.0, but some schools pump those numbers by tacking .5 onto honors classes and 1.0 onto AP. At other schools its 1.0 and 2.0. Other schools don't have APs at all, or don't offer a bump for high-level courses. Who is the "better student?" The one who has a 4.43 at a school where there are no APs and honors is a .5 bump, or the student with a 5.28 at a school that offers 19 APs and gives a 2.0 bump? It's ludicrous.

Or, of course, the student who has a 4.0 at a school that doesn't give bumps at all, but took no actual AP classes because that would ruin his/her GPA?

Hah. I went to TJ and, at a gathering with a few other high school classmates, I bemoaned how unhealthy I thought the atmosphere was there. I'm not saying it was disastrous when we went there, but it was a divorced-from-reality, barely-visible-high-pressure environment. Going to a prestigious, competitive state school was seen by several of my classmates as "failing" because it wasn't as good as going to an Ivy or another high profile institution.

An environment made up entirely of kids who are accustomed to being the smartest student in the class is going to produce some very unpleasant results under high pressure. I wonder how the counseling team approaches the problem.

When were you there? I attended from 1998-2002, and it was a pretty collegial place back then. Very little competitive pressure from the teachers or administration, no class ranking, etc. Lots of self-imposed consternation about getting into top colleges, but that usually didn't bubble up into the social interactions.

Hmmm, this helps me better understand a former college who went to MIT, would have been class of '97, and before that decided not to attend TJ because he wanted a more normal high school experience. Struck me as strange at the time, but if TJ is this aberrant, much more than any of the other schools in its class you hear about like Stuyvesant and the other NYC high schools that puts lots of graduated into MIT.

The article quotes a student complaining about the pressure for extracurricular activities, but I think this is a good case in favor of sports:

Do you know a runner? They have experienced failure and lost races.

This is an important lesson that a lot of kids seem to be missing, especially at these elite high schools. Furthermore, each Ivy will only accept so many students each year from TJ or Andover Academy, so a lot of high school students would be better off if they worked hard at a public school, especially one in an underrepresented area.

In the uk there are reports of kids from public schools going to a good state 6th form for the last two years of school to help game the admissions process.

Underage high School girl lies <==> international scandal.

Seriously people.

At best this is, stupid media gets fooled by a troubled girl at a time many teens are at a tough time in their lives. Classmates not as stupid.

Technically this is stupid media gets temporarily fooled by a troubled girl respected parents. The girl wasn't doing this on her own.

"Another senior, who designed the electronics system for a 6-foot, 120-pound robot capable of lifting crates"

Would be very interested to see some video of this in action. Couldn't seem to find it any where.

That would be this years FRC challenge. I'm sure there are videos of th competitions online.

Getting into all 8 Ivies -- what a shallow way to measure intelligence.

Its how they market them selves to parents

These sorts of attitudes are so alien to me. At my high school it was impressive to get into UNC (we were in state)

Upper class families in some Asian countries are fanatical about getting into the worlds best colleges. Anyone who has attended such a college would immediately recognize this story as a hoax. But there are some extreme things such families do that are not that far off from this.

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