UNIVERSITY UPDATES

Please read a message below from Mr Mark Gathercole, an expert on University admissions.

From: Mark Gathercole

Dear Parents, Students, and High Schools;

By now, you’ve heard about the cheating scandal in the US involving parents who used bribes and lies to get their kids into elite colleges. It’s all over the news in the US, every hour.

How did this all work? Parents paid an agency called “The Key” to show them how to cheat in order to get their kids into “elite” colleges. The two main ways uncovered so far:

• Paying a university athletic coach to tell the admissions office that they wanted the student for their team, even though the student didn’t even play the sport in high school; some parents and coaches even photoshopped the student’s face onto pictures of other athletes in action.
• Paying SAT supervisors to give the students extra time on the SAT, or to change the student’s answers to correct ones after the test.

Be clear – this is about a dishonest agent and ambitious, wealthy parents who secretly paid to get their kids into college. University Admissions offices were not a part of this – they were the main victims of the scam, having been fooled by these parents and this agency.

University admissions offices throughout the US are outraged. They honestly try to connect with your child’s application and work hard to find reasons to accept them as they nurture the application through the process. Admissions offices will be looking more closely than ever at applications to weed out dishonest ones. Even though full-paying families do have some advantage if they are academically qualified – I know from talking and working with them that all admissions people (including Harvard, Stanford, and the other “elites”) have always appreciated students who present honest, straightforward applications and who have the courage to be exactly who they are on those applications – and they will appreciate that even more now. Those are the students they want. That’s why it’s more important than ever to present yourself in the best honest and accurate way possible to admissions offices.

Thank you, Mr Mark