The application essay from a student in China sounded much like thousands of others sent each year to the University of Washington at Seattle.
“‘I did this,’” admissions officer Kim Lovaas remembers the essay saying, and, “‘I did that.’” Then she came to a phrase that stopped her short: “Insert girl’s name here.”
“I thought, ‘Did I just read that?’” says Lovaas, associate director for international student enrollment, admissions, and services. “To me, that was a really big red flag.”
The obvious clue in the essay was an indicator of a serious problem that’s not always so easy to detect: fraudulent applications from Chinese students seeking to get into U.S. colleges and universities.
Admissions officials and others have reported finding falsified high school transcripts, discrepancies between English-language test scores and a Chinese student’s actual speaking ability, and phony letters of recommendation and essays.
As many as 90 percent of recommendation letters for Chinese applicants to Western universities were falsified in 2011, the most recent period studied, according to the U.S. educational consulting firm Zinch China. Seventy percent of admissions essays were written by someone other than the applicants, the firm found, and half of secondary school transcripts were doctored.
Zinch has not updated those figures, and estimates of the extent of cheating vary widely, but admissions officials said that at least as many as one in 10 Chinese applications may include fraudulent material.
