Admissions Officers Reveal Worst Application Lies

Buzz Feed

a day ago

With back-to-school season commencing, have you ever wondered what happens to the people who blatantly lie on college applications?
Some of them inevitably get caught, and it's definitely not the best look for them. In one Reddit thread (which you can see here), college admissions officers and independent college consultants shared the wildest instances of lying they've seen on an application, and some of these are so bad, it's hard not to chuckle a little.
Here are 15 memorable instances of people who inflated or even completely fabricated their experiences, as told by the pros themselves:
"There was an application that was talking so elegantly about music, their supposed expertise, and when they submitted a music supplement, it got the lowest faculty rating lol. Don't know if that's lying or being delusional or both. Funny all the same."
"They submitted a fake 'official' transcript. But they screwed up our mailing address, so it was returned to sender. They had the wherewithal to use the return address for the school they were faking, so it was sent back to that school's registrar. The registrar reached out to me, saying, 'Hey, this student didn't go here.'"
"Not an admissions officer, but I work with families as an independent consultant. A blatantly faked part of an application I've seen is an essay draft where every period in the sentence was followed by two spaces... that's what the older generation (i.e. parents) was taught with typing."
"A relic of the typewriter and early word processing (who calls it that anymore) days. Having seen previous examples of the student's actual writing to compare with, it was pretty obvious that the parent had more than a heavy hand in that draft. We stopped working together after I gently called them out on it and warned them. They got very defensive lol."–Brother_Ma_Education
"I used to be an admissions officer, and the one that is most common was when a student would say they had no disciplinary history, but the counselor's letter would say or imply otherwise."
"The student wrote about his experience in the womb. While this isn't technically lying, it's pretty damn wild."
"It's not hard to see through most 'non-profits.' Perhaps not lying, per se, but if your website looks like a standard Squarespace site or has 10 officers who are all college seniors, the BS detector is going off."
"I had one homeschooled applicant whose mom's transcript reported all As, but the transcripts directly from community college (for dual enrollment) showed Cs and Bs."
–admissioncat
"There was one student who had letters of recommendation where one was talking about how they were the absolute best student in the world, but the counselor's LOR destroyed the student, calling them the most immature student who cheats on exams. One person was lying on this application. I never looked into it because they weren't very competitive in the end, anyway."
"I'm a professional consultant and not a former AO, but there are several instances in my career when I refused to continue working with a student, or they refused to continue working with me, because I would not support fabricated information."
"A student who spent time in Afghanistan wrote in an essay draft that the Taliban bombed a television studio where he was working because it aired a documentary he made about women's education. There was a bombing at the TV studio around that time. Still, he was nowhere near the building, and the Taliban's stated reason was the TV station's coverage of military activities. I'll also add that I met only with the kid's dad, and it was clear that he would be the one revising the essays. When I insisted that I meet directly with the student and explained that he needed to be honest (and that AOs could discover what I did), the dad ghosted me."–AppHelper
"I had a student write an essay about holding her grandmother's hand while she died, watching the heart rate monitor, and feeling a sense of peace. Upon questioning, she was THREE when her grandmother passed. She said she didn't really remember it, but her mother had told her about it."
"I had an applicant who put down 'University Donor' on their activities list, indicating they donated $100 to the university. Do they think we don't have access to this database? Even if it was true (which it wasn't), definitely don't put that on the activities list."
"Triplets and their cousin all in the same graduating class at a high school used the same expensive independent college consultant. She wrote their (bad) essay for them and submitted the same one for all four students."
"We rejected all four and took a step further to notify the other schools they applied to (back when Common App asked and students willingly put their whole college list — never do that). One had already been admitted to Notre Dame and had it rescinded. The parents and students accused us of lying and threatened to sue until we simply showed them their identical four essays. I think they turned on the consultant after that. The best part? This was a prominent college consultant in her 60s who was working with some of the most affluent schools in a large TX city for decades. We ended up combing back through all the essays from the area that year and found a few more. We didn't bother looking into past years. AI would have been nice back then."–LicketLicketyZooZoo
"They submitted fake letters of reference. I was suspicious of the email address for one recommender, so I Googled them to try and find a different way to contact them to verify they actually submitted the letter. The person had been dead for almost two years."
"My dad has reviewed apps for a summer research program before. One guy put he started a nonprofit that helped 800k North Korean refugees establish themselves (for reference, there's 200-300k total)."
And finally, "If you haven't watched the Varsity Blues scandal documentary on Netflix, I highly recommend it. These kids lied about wild stuff. The one that eventually broke the case wide open was one kid saying he did varsity crew for 4 years at high school. His high school didn't have a crew team… AO thought his app was suspicious, so he called the counselor to confirm."
What do you think? Let me know in the comments!