#test prep tutoring austin | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

nigeiadigitalmarketingcompany · 5 years ago

Text

Credentialism and Corruption: A Second Look at the College Admissions Scandals

Digital Elixir Credentialism and Corruption: A Second Look at the College Admissions Scandals

By Lambert Strether of Corrente

We’ve had yet another college admissions scandal enter the headlines, briefly, and so I thought I’d aggregate the other recent college admissions scandals; it’s surprising — or not! — how prevalent they are. Then I’ll do a simple piece of arithmetic that I haven’t been able to find in the coverage.

The Scandals

This aggregation is by no means exhaustive[1]; what is most striking is the routine seaminess of it. Interestingly, only the “Varsity Blues” (2019) and “Clout goes to college” (2009) have catchy, “Watergate”-like monikers; the others are simply isolated news stories. Where no moniker exists, I invented one (“Fencing Coach Gets House”). In particular order, but starting with this month’s scandal, which made me think, “What, again? So soon?” Sometimes the institution is corrupt (e.g., Harvard), and sometimes the ingenious providers of professional services are corrupt. In all cases, the parents who participate in these schemes are corrupt.

Gaming Guardianship (professional services). From Inside Higher Ed:

[T]hat parents in suburban Chicago had taken part in a scam to increase their children’s eligibility for need-based financial aid for college. The scam, apparently devised by independent college consultant Lora Georgieva, owner of Destination College in Lincolnshire, Ill., involved parents giving up legal guardianship of their children during the junior or senior year of high school to a friend or family member. That allowed the student to claim independent status, meaning that eligibility for financial aid was based only on the student’s earnings rather than the parents’ income and assets.

Yes, you read that correctly. Parents gave up legal guardianship of their children for the purpose of qualifying for financial aid for college. In Lake County, Ill., alone, there were 38 cases in 2018 where a probate court judge granted transfer of guardianship for a teenager in the junior or senior year of high school. Most of those cases involved families living in homes valued at more that $500,000.

The story raises a number of questions. Did no one in the legal system in Lake County find an epidemic of wealthy parents giving up guardianship of their high school children in the least bit suspicious? Nearly all of the 38 cases above were filed with similar language: “The guardian can provide educational and financial support and opportunities to the minor that her parents could not otherwise provide.” I have read enough Scott Turow novels and watched enough episodes of The Good Wife to know that the judicial system in Illinois may be less than pure, but really?

“Operation Varsity Blues” (multiple Ivies and wannabe Ivies). The Guardian:

There are 50 people charged in the case, including actors Felicity Huffman, known for her role on the TV show Desperate Housewives and the feature film Transamerica, and Lori Loughlin, a cast member on the TV series Full House. Defendants in the case include parents and college athletics coaches.

The wealthy parents were part of the biggest college admissions scam ever prosecuted by the Department of Justice, prosecutors say, accused of conspiring to get their kids into elite colleges through bribery and cheating. The FBI investigation was dubbed “Operation Varsity Blues”.

Administrators of the SAT and ACT college exams were bribed to allow someone else to pretend to be the student and take the exam in their place, according to a criminal complaint. In other cases, the proctors gave the students answers or fixed their wrong answers after they had taken the test.

The children sometimes faked learning disabilities so that they would be able to take the tests at facilities where staff had been paid off, the complaint says; parents paid between $15,000 and $75,000 a test to participate in the cheating scheme, which was allegedly masterminded by William Singer, who ran a college prep company called The Key.

In another part of the scheme, college coaches allegedly received bribes to designate applicants as recruited athletes – which gives them a leg-up in admissions – regardless of their athletic ability, and sometimes when they didn’t even play the sport they were supposedly recruited for. Clients paid Singer a total of $25m to bribe coaches and university administrators, prosecutors say.

The schools include Yale, Stanford, Georgetown, the University of Southern California, the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Texas.

Fencing Coach Gets House (Harvard). Deadspin:

The Boston Globe reported Tuesday that an independent investigation initiated by Harvard determined that Brand violated the university’s conflict-of-interest policy when he sold his home to wealthy Maryland businessman Jie “Jack” Zhao for $989,500 in 2016, or about $440,000 more than its assessed value. Zhao’s eldest son, Eric, was then attending Harvard and competing with the Crimson fencing team; Zhao’s younger son, Edward, was still in high school and “interested in fencing for Harvard.” Zhao purchased Brand’s home at the obscene markup in May 2016; 15 months later Edward began attending Harvard as a fencing recruit; two months after that, in October 2017, Zhao sold the home at a loss of more than $320,000. In the view of Harvard’s investigators, this sequence reeked of conflict.

“Clout Goes to College (University of Illinois). Chicago Tribune:

At a time when it’s more competitive than ever to get into the University of Illinois, some students with subpar academic records are being admitted after interference from state lawmakers and university trustees, a Tribune investigation has revealed.

Hundreds of applicants received special consideration in the last five years, according to documents obtained by the Tribune under the state’s Freedom of Information Act. The records chronicle a shadow admissions system in which some students won spots at the state’s most prestigious public university over the protests of admissions officers, while others had their rejections reversed during an unadvertised appeal process. In one case, a relative of Antoin “Tony” Rezko, the now-convicted influence peddler for former Gov. Rod Blagojevich, got admitted after U. of I. President B. Joseph White wrote an e-mail stating that the governor “has expressed his support, and would like to see admitted” Rezko’s relative and another applicant.

Since 2005, about 800 undergraduate students have landed on the clout list for the Urbana-Champaign campus. It’s unknown how many would qualify for entry on their own, but their acceptance rate is higher than average. For the 2008-09 school year, for example, about 77 percent were accepted, compared with 69 percent of all applicants.

That’s in spite of the fact that patronage candidates, as a group, had lower average ACT scores and class ranks than all admitted students, records show….

[T]he Tribune review of about 1,800 pages of documents shows politically appointed trustees and lawmakers routinely behave as armchair admissions officers advocating on behalf of relatives and neighbors — even housekeepers’ kids and families with whom they share Hawaiian vacations.

Juice at the Board of Regents (University of Texas at Austin). Texas Tribune, one of many examples:

During the tenure of UT-Austin President Larry Faulkner, which ended in 2005, one official saw a note from a a UT System regent that said every graduate of a specific high school should be admitted to UT.

Gaming Special Needs (professional services). WGBH:

Gordon Caplan, a prominent attorney from Greenwich, Conn., pleaded guilty in May to paying $75,000 to get his daughter fraudulently diagnosed with special needs, which enabled her to get extra time on the ACT exam. Speaking outside the federal courthouse in Boston, he apologized to his daughter.

“We’ve seen a remarkable and disturbing pattern lately of highly-advantaged people taking illegal advantage of the college admissions system, but this is just the tip of the iceberg,” [Paul Reville, a former Massachusetts education secretary who now teaches at Harvard University] said. “Whether or not you can get a designation for a special need that will then enable you to get extended time so you can improve your scores on the SAT is just one of many legal pathways to the advantaged further advantaging their children.”

Gaming the Transcripts (professional services). New York Times:

T.M. Landry’s founders, Mike and Tracey Landry, put the very real obstacles that exist for some minorities — a higher proportion of first-generation college applicants, limited access to wealthier school districts, and a scarcity of affordable college application coaches and tutors, to name a few — at the very heart of their pitch.

The Landrys explicitly vowed to get black students into top universities; to level a vastly uneven playing field; to put into reach a college education that many teenagers and their parents worried was outside their grasp.

Their magnetic pitch had students staying at T.M. Landry despite enduring what they described as severe emotional and physical abuse. “He seemed to see in us what we didn’t see in ourselves,” Raymond Smith, a T.M. Landry alumnus, said of Mr. Landry.

In addition, dozens of parents have continued to stand by the Landrys. “The reason I’m here is return on investment,” one woman said in an audio recording of a parents’ meeting convened after our initial investigation was published in November. The Landrys “give us hope that I never would have imagined going after,” she said.

But the Landrys could not have attracted students without also delivering results. Transcripts were littered with inflated grades, nonexistent extracurricular activities and fictitious classes. In recommendation letters, they fabricated and exaggerated stories of hardship that played on negative racial stereotypes. And they encouraged students to do the same.

The Arithmetic

And now the promised arithmetic. Since “Operation Varsity Blues” focused on the Ives, let’s do the same. For the Class of 2021:

Total Applicants: 32,724 + 37,389 + 47,038 + 20,034 + 39,506 + 40,413 + 31,056 + 32,900 = 281,060

Total Acceptances: 2,722 + 2,185 + 5,889 + 2,092 + 2,056 + 3,699 + 1,890 + 2,272 = 22,805

Now, some percentage, as we have seen from the aggregation above, of the Total Applicants will be corrupt (corrupt in the sense of taking place through fraud or bribery, and not “donating” for a building or being a legacy). What percentage shall we use? Since the United States, obviously, is not a Third World country, where literally everything is done with personal networking and tea money, and everything is for sale, we should set the percentage of corrupt applicants quite low. Let’s set the percentate of corrupt applications at 1%: 281,060 * 1% = 2,816.

Of the corrupt applications, how many will turn out to be accepted? I would argue 100%. That’s what the (wealthy) parents thought they were buying. China Daily:

The parents involved in the scandal, however, obviously wanted more than a mere 10-fold advantage, they wanted certainty, could afford to pay for it and didn’t care either about what methods were used or who would be harmed.

So, if 100% get in, you can assume that 2,816 — forgive the spurious precision — of admissions to the Ivies are fraudulent. Assume further that they all graduate, either because the Ivies are lax, or because they (and their parents) apply the same methods to collect the diploma that they applied to secure their admission. That means that of the (roughly) 22,805 graduates from the Ivies in 2021, 2,816, or more than 10%, were fraudulent applications. On the bright side, if the letterhead from your collection agency has a Harvard man (or woman) listed on it, there’s a one-in-ten chance they’re a crook. So there’s that.

Conclusion

Lifetime will make a movie about it all. People:

The Lifetime network announced on Tuesday that it was greenlighting a new movie based on the high-profile scandal. The working title is College Admissions Scandal, but the network acknowledges that the title may change.

The movie will follow two wealthy mothers who share an obsession with getting their teenagers into the best possible college. When charismatic college admissions consultant Rick Singer offers a side door into the prestigious institutions of their dreams, they willingly partake with visions of coveted acceptance letters in their heads.

But when Singer cooperates with the FBI and pleads guilty, the mothers must face the consequences of their actions and the loss of trust and respect from their families.

Those (“wealthy,” “highly-advantaged people”) people aren’t crooks. They were seduced. “The woman said, ‘The serpent beguiled me, and I ate.‘” Maybe so. But Singer wasn’t the serpent.

NOTES

[1] Perhaps I was not diligent enough, but I couldn’t find a comprehensive study of corruption in the college admissions process, at least in the United States (as opposed to China). A quick scan at NBER yields no titles of interest. I’d welcome such a study for follow-up.

Credentialism and Corruption: A Second Look at the College Admissions Scandals

from WordPress https://ift.tt/2M2sRnH via IFTTT

#Digital Marketing #SEO #Social Media Marketing #Nigeria Digital Marketing Company #Lead Generation

0 notes

paulbenedictblog · 5 years ago

Text

%news%

New Post has been published on %http://paulbenedictsgeneralstore.com%

Here's exactly how to get into Harvard Law School, according to the chief admissions officer, 2 students, and 2 admissions consultants

This yarn requires our BI High membership. To learn the corpulent article, simply click here to recount your deal and web access to all distinctive Business Insider PRIME thunder.

Kristi Jacobson, the manager admissions officer at Harvard Law College, Jeff Thomas, Kaplan Test Prep's govt director of admissions programs, and Anna Ivey, a talented admissions consultant, spoke with Business Insider about prepare and optimize your application to Harvard Law College.

Must you ship for your application issues, so applying strategically is smooth.

HLS takes the GRE — but the LSAT is peaceable a more in-depth bet.

Love titles don't make for greater letters of recommendation — and less is extra when it involves non-public essays and addendums.

Click here for extra BI High experiences.

Cameron Clark began training for a future correct occupation when he used to be peaceable an adolescent. In high college in Houston, he sharpened his rhetorical and extreme-thinking abilities on the debate personnel. In college at The University of Texas at Austin, he cultivated relationships with professors, interned, and saved his nose in the books and his GPA high. That diligence in the kill earned him acceptance-letter gold: entry to Harvard Law College.

Even in mild of all his tough work, admission into the highly selective program used to be peaceable an spectacular feat. Clark graduated in 2018, the yr that, according to recordsdata from the American Bar Affiliation, the series of lawyers in the US reached a 21st-century high. Handiest a little piece are HLS grads: In 2018, the college — currently third in the rankings, in the abet of suitable Stanford and Yale — got 7,419 functions and equipped admission to suitable 12% of applicants. Kristi Jacobson, chief admissions officer at HLS, shared that there are currently a lean 561 college students enrolled in the 1L class of 2022.

Cameron Clark.

Cameron Clark

Nonetheless whereas Clark's yarn sounds love an archetypal path to the Ivy Leagues, additionally it is miles much from the solely means to web there. Per law college admissions instructing consultant Anna Ivey, a customary dean of the University of Chicago Law College herself, "HLS admissions officers are very conscientious about recruiting minorities of reasonably just a few kinds: They wish a diversity of colleges folks and geographic areas," along side veterans and older applicants.

Which is all to recount: There would possibly maybe be no standard profile for an HLS scholar. And though the bar is incontrovertibly high, with the elegant preparation and recordsdata, it will most likely be extra reachable than you concentrate on. Read on for skilled perception about plan the LSAT, optimize your application provides, and live far from errors admissions officers ogle yr after yr.

Some college students, love Clark, originate laying the groundwork years ahead of ever for sure applying. Others judge they must move to law college all over college after working for just a few years, or later in life.

Nonetheless when it involves the application cycle for subsequent yr's enrollment: "All things being equal, earlier is extra healthy," explained Jacobson, HLS' chief admissions officer.

Anna Ivey.

Anna Ivey

Historically, the college has admitted college students on a rolling foundation. Nonetheless in 2019, it made the shift to rounds of admission, posting the three dates applicants would possibly maybe maybe well be admitted on the detailed and informative Harvard Law College admissions blog: December 16, February 10, and March 16. The switch used to be designed to drag the volume of submissions as well as give dismay-ridden applicants extra concrete perception into the process. The concept is that if you're chopping it shut to one date, it is unlikely your provides will most likely be reviewed all over that round and thus it is extra shiny to are trying for the following window as an replacement of dashing.

That being stated: Don't crawl, instructed Ivey. "With law college admissions, there [are] all forms of stuff that happens after you put up," she explained. Interviews, continually performed by process of video, has to be scheduled and carried out for those though-provoking onto the following round.

Historically, the LSAT has been the move-to exam for would-be law college students. Nonetheless in recent years, a series of colleges all the plan thru the nation — HLS among them — non-public allowed college students to put up GRE scores as an replacement. Serene, extra typically than not, it is clever for college students to follow the LSAT, explained Jeff Thomas, Kaplan Test Prep's govt director of admissions programs.

Jeff Thomas.

Jeff Thomas

The cause being that if you're applying to colleges that don't capture the GRE, you are going to non-public to capture the LSAT anyway. And if you capture the LSAT, the ABA solutions require that colleges factor in you the expend of those scores.

"The bottom line is: Except the solely colleges you apply to capture the GRE, don't bother to capture it," stated Thomas. Plus, there is a silver lining to your entire LSAT work you would possibly maybe put in. The test is designed to mimic the abilities one makes expend of in law college, so give it some thought pre-training to your future scholastic pursuits.

Folks typically inquire of Thomas if it is correct that the LSAT is any such heavily weighted component. "The retort, reasonably frankly, is yes," he stated. The fluctuate for the LSAT procure is 120 to 180, with 151 as the median 50th percentile procure; spots at elite colleges typically move to the discontinuance 1% to 2%, or those with a 170 or above. It's top to peaceable be in the ballpark to be aggressive — nor can you write or interview your means round heart-broken scores.

The correct recordsdata is that observe makes … well, probably not supreme, but high probably for enchancment.

"I equate it to learning play a sport or a musical instrument: Ethical which technique of you do not non-public the abilities lately would not mean you would possibly maybe well presumably not invent them the following day," stated Thomas. The test is given nine times every yr. Thomas encourages applicants to care for their date for a time after they'll exercise three months beforehand treating it as a high precedence.

Mikaela Gilbert-Lurie.

Mikaela Gilbert-Lurie

Whereas it is tempting to at as soon as be a part of a prep path, factor in testing your abilities solo, equipped Mikaela Gilbert-Lurie, HLS class of 2021. "Sooner than you sink a ton of money right into a category or a tutor — or even the books, which shall be $50 every — concentrate on where you are. Now not all people needs to learn in a learn room environment," she stated. In her case, observe tests published that logic video games were her feeble level, so she doubled down on studying for that piece.

Clark added one more component to his studying. "It's top to capture [practice exams] in as tough of conditions as you would also," he stated. Put together for the nerves you would possibly maybe for sure feel on the day and try and mimic those all over observe checks, he instructed. In his case, that intended taking observe tests in distracting circumstances, along side chilly temperatures and a noisy Starbucks.

It paid off: The day Clark sat for the LSAT, the room used to be freezing and the room used to be a chorus of sniffles, but he had no distress staying targeted.

Thru asking folks to write a letter for your behalf, you would possibly maybe well presumably purchase that spectacular titles are a precedence. Now not so, stated Jacobson. "It be about substance over signature," she explained, adding that any individual who has extra to recount about you is a more in-depth replacement than any individual who you encountered solely temporarily. "The letters are for sure vital and they also're important extra meaningful if we non-public a substantial sense of who you are from any individual who's aware of you well," she added.

Kristi Jacobson.

Kristi Jacobson

When reaching out to these folks, it will also be beneficial to share samples of your work or jog their recollections with anecdotes about your background together. Ethical guarantee you are giving them ample lead time — Jacobson recommends three months a minimal of.

"I'm able to't portray you the series of times I've learn a letter of recommendation where the recommender says one thing love, 'I didn't non-public ample time to prepare this which technique of so-and-so asked me solely two weeks ago,'" she shared.

In total, there are four very vital components of the HLS application: the educational file initiating with college, LSAT (or GRE) scores, the interview, and the non-public assertion. HLS would not require that the non-public assertion be about why you would possibly maybe well presumably like to switch to Harvard or even why you would possibly maybe well presumably like to switch to law college, necessarily.

"The emphasis on the non-public assertion is 'non-public,'" stated Ivey. "It's essential not writing it as if it were a term paper or a dissertation: The precise matter is you."

The two-paged, double-spaced essay mustn't be a rehash of your resume both, added Jacobson. Fairly, it would peaceable complement every little thing else you've got got submitted with out marching the reader thru recordsdata they've already encountered. She also instantaneous having any individual who would not know you well learn it over and summarize it abet to you: If their description would not expend what you are trying to lift, it is time to revise.

Clark surmounted this utter by leaning on the tools of story journalism. His non-public assertion opened with a description of a Sunless Lives Subject die-in squawk he attended all over undergrad that took recount to occur all over a most most significant civil rights anniversary. Building on that constructing, he used to be in a recount to delve into his passions and targets and contact on Harvard's legacy of coaching civil rights leaders all the plan thru history.

Clark also submitted an optionally out there assertion, one thing that applicants must peaceable solely attain in the occasion that they for sure for sure feel there is one thing that hasn't been covered in other areas of their application, according to every skilled Business Insider spoke with. This one-paged, double spaced supplement has an analog in the "diversity statements" applicants write for other law colleges.

"It's probably you'll maybe even capture it in a total bunch directions. One of my favorites from last yr used to be any individual who wrote about being a unicyclist," stated Jacobson.

In Clark's case, he wrote about what folks which shall be not white, male, or of means lift to the HLS community-at-substantial: "A couple of the time, you come right into a dwelling love that if you're gloomy, weird and wonderful, low-earnings, or an immigrant, and your experiences are the issues being debated," he stated. "You wish me to attain the unpaid labor of coaching your college students about gloomy custom and weird and wonderful custom and these issues."

Nonetheless additionally it is miles value remembering that suitable which technique of you can put up extra recordsdata would not mean you would possibly maybe perchance — or must peaceable. Ivey argued that one thing that appears so vital that it appears to advantage an addendum shall be greater integrated into your individual assertion.

"Even though a college invites you to put up one thing, if it is not required, it is advisable to peaceable for sure non-public a correct cause for sending it," stated Ivey. Overdoing it will ogle self-vital, and admissions staffers are already neck-deep in forms.

Clark recalled his interview as being for sure "anticlimactic" — a easy video session where folks are asked to keep in touch in depth about why they must move to law college. When counseling recent applicants, he reminded them to gain their on-line presence up-to-the-minute — in particular LinkedIn — and learn up on the one who will most likely be interviewing them.

"Mainly, be aware that folks are researching you," he added.

Ivey instantaneous being willing to chat about why you would possibly maybe well presumably like to pursue a law degree and what you hope to care for out. "A spread of folks apply to law college as a path of least resistance, and admissions officers are having a request to weed out folks which shall be there for prestige or rankings," she stated. "The interview is less a pair of excellent or erroneous retort and additional about: Are you able to've got a dialog? Are you able to sound love a considerate particular person?"

Final but not least, Jacobson added that applicants must peaceable recount in regards to the relaxation they included of their provides elegant sport, and to refamiliarize themselves with what they wrote. As soon as, just a few years ago, an applicant listed "baking bread" as one of their non-public pursuits — when Jacobson asked them about it, they blanked. If it is for your file, she stated, "It's top to peaceable be willing to chat about it."

More: BI High Plot High Negotiable Deal BI-freelancer

Chevron iconIt signifies an expandable piece or menu, or as soon as in a whereas outdated / subsequent navigation choices.

0 notes