For many students, college is the first step to a bright and successful future. However, to get into the institution of their desire, some students are ready to commit a little deception. Admission statistics show that Americans are submitting more college applications than ever before. Compared to previous years, the 2024-2025 cycle saw a 6% increase in total applications.
But quantity doesn't amount to too much if the quality isn't there. And some applicants embellish their applications so much that they start to look sus. Recently, one netizen asked admissions officers to share the most outrageous claims they saw. They wrote: "College admissions officers, whats the worst example of lying in an application you reviewed?"
A little lie never hurt nobody, people like to say. Yet these lies might've cost some young people a spot at the college of their dreams. And they're also a good lesson in what not to include in your college applications!
#1
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).
Image credits: PhilosophyBeLyin
#2
Worst lie? Submitted a fake "official" transcript. But they screwed up our mailing address, so it was returned to sender. They had the wherewithall 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 to be like hey, this student didn't go here....
Image credits: frankenplant
#3
I think the most obvious “face-palm” moment I encountered was a long personal statement about an applicant losing his mother to cancer and how this inspired to him to live a more positive life with a new outlook on life….and listed his main contact number as his “mother’s cell phone.”
We needed to contact him about an issue with his transcripts. Curious, I double-checked that there was no “step-parent” mention in either his essay or family information section of the application, but the essay was also written about the very recent passing of his mother, so I did not truly believe there would be a new mother within 3 months, but you never know.
I called him on his self-indicated main contact number, only to have a lovely conversation with his startlingly-alive mother! So either I stumbled into some newly-acquired gifts as a medium, or that essay was a fabrication.
Image credits: Michaela Schieffer
Most of us probably cheated at least once in school. Whether it was during a test, an oral exam, or just a simple exercise in class, even the most academically devout sometimes come unprepared. But cheating in your college application is a whole different beast: the stakes are wildly different.
Still, the amount of students who admit embellishing their college applications is staggering. According to integrity researcher David Rettinger's study, 70% of American college students admit to cheating in some form during their college years. And when it comes to falsifying information in their admissions applications, 61% said they included "untrue information to some part."
#4
Oh man my time to shine.
Funniest example? 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.
Image credits: frankenplant
#5
Student wrote about his experience in the womb. While this isn't technically lying, it's pretty d**n WTF ARE YOU THINKING?!
Image credits: EmploymentNegative59
#6
Homeschooled applicant where the mom's transcript reported all As but the transcripts directly from community college (for dual enrollment) showed Cs and Bs...
Image credits: admissioncat
You might think that admissions officers spend hours on one application and rigorously check the validity of its claims. But the reality is different; experts say that the majority of applications are not fact-checked.
The American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers consultant Michele Sandlin explains that admissions officers are simply too overwhelmed with the sheer amount of applications to check if every single claim in them is true.
Some facts they can check: things like grades, previous schooling, teacher recommendations, and test results. But personal stories in the essays are much harder to verify, and there have been some students who masterfully fooled admissions officers with their tales and got into the best colleges in the country.
#7
Most outrageous case: An applicant lied about her sibling having Down syndrome. We audited the student after their counselor reached out to us.
Image credits: EliteScholarAdvising
#8
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.
Image credits: FoolishConsistency17
#9
I had a student show up with an essay draft in which he talked about volunteering at a nonprofit in Africa where he held dying children in his arms until they were dead. Moved by the experience, he began teaching Africans how to ferment their vegetables so they wouldn’t starve to death anymore.
When I finished reading, I looked up at him and said, “Why did you write this?”
He said he thought it would make him stand out.
“Have you actually been to Africa?”
“No.”
I insisted that he would stand out more by figuring out a way to share his story. We spent a long time talking about his accomplishments, interests, and beliefs before I made a single suggestion, but by the time we were finished, I saw a total shift in his attitude. It really makes a difference when someone makes you feel like you are important and you are enough.
Image credits: Eva Glasrud
According to academic integrity researcher David Rettinger's study, 34% of students claim they've written untrue stories for their applications. And he says that students see little incentive to stay truthful. "If they lie on their application, what happens when they get caught?" he invites us to consider. "The worst thing that happens is the thing that would have happened anyway: that they won't get in. They're not thinking of the bigger consequences, the cultural values."
#10
I've seen badly photoshopped transcripts. Mostly out of specific international countries where the schools have a history of fabricating transcripts.
There was app 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.
Image credits: Aggravating_Humor
#11
Someone wrote a very lovely and extensive essay on how they wanted to go to Vanderbilt. For an application to American in DC.
Image credits: TardTheRetard
#12
A student fabricated a story about helping raise awareness of a disability in school because his best friend had that disability. There was a student with that disability in class, but he wasn't the student's best friend, and there was never any awareness campaign. I was also skeptical about some of the student's other ECs, like having invented something oddly similar to an existing product and helping thousands of underprivileged people with two separate non-profit initiatives. After I refused to help him with essays that I knew made false claims and he "fired" me, I did some research. It turned out that the website the student set up about his non-profits used stock photos and old pictures from another website as examples of the people the initiatives had benefited.
Image credits: AppHelper
In 2018, a Louisiana school got caught fabricating applications to get their students into top colleges. The T.M. Landry College Preparatory School faked the students' transcripts and up-from-hardship stories, basing them on racial stereotypes. The school's hopes got squashed, however, when an investigation by The New York Times uncovered the truth.
#13
Many applicants inflate the number of hours in their activities to the point that they would be sleeping an average of 30 minutes each night.
Image credits: EliteScholarAdvising
#14
Aw man, why am I always too late for these things! I work in the IT-deparment of a quite prestegious business school, which means that everyone will try their hardest to get into a programme. I once heard that an applicant had attached a picture of a street sign in Australia as proof of his "experience abroad". He wasn't even included in the picture, it was literally just a picture of a road sign!
#15
I was reading MBA applications for a top 20 business school.
A guy wrote that his dream was to create a not for profit that painted murals in the inner-city using photovoltaic (glow in the dark) paint. He was trying to combine social service (not for profit & inner city) with sustainability (mural paint that glowed by itself?). The admissions department thought he was an interesting candidate with strong community values.
I was 99% sure the whole story was BS.
This was a suburban kid with a mainstream background trying to look interesting.
I cold called him and asked him to walk me through his dream project. He couldn't do it. So I asked “Is this for real?” and he confessed he made the whole thing up. The shame of it was that his grades were good and the rest of the application made sense.
He would have gotten in if he had simply told the truth.
However, experts say that cases like T.M. Landry are an exception, not the rule. Consultant at the College Essay Mentor service Christopher Hunt explained to The New York Times that Landry is an extreme.
"There is an alignment of incentives to work the system," he said. "Much more common is students, parents and school college counselors trying to figure out what admissions officers 'want' and molding students' lives and applications to the vision of success."
#16
Never been an AO, but been around the industry and personally know some.
Saw a mom literally typing her son's college essays. She wasn't even trying to hide it. The essay was filled with words and sentence structures the student couldn't possibly have formulated.
Image credits: EmploymentNegative59
#17
Parents who fill out their kid's app and then mistakenly put either their name, date of birth, or SSN on the student's app.
#18
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 he was working in because it aired a documentary he made about women's education. There *was* a bombing on the TV studio around that time, but 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 explain that he needed to be honest (and that AOs could discover what I did), the dad ghosted me.
Other experts told The New York Times that they don't mind parents helping with applications. As long as they don't do the whole work, it's acceptable. Most admissions officers agree that it's fine for parents and teachers to help students. The admission process is a daunting and difficult process, and it's okay to ask for support.
#19
I have a lot but 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 their identical four essays. I think they turned on the consultant after that.
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.
#20
There was one student who had LORs 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 that 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.
#21
Someone claimed that his sister was ki**ed in a t**rorist bus bombing in Jammu and Kashmir when he was nine. It was the kind of thing that would be in the news (and thus verifiable), so I tried to look up the details. There *was* a t**rorist attack on a bus in India around the time, but it was a shooting--not a bombing--and it wasn't in J&K. When I confronted him about it, he admitted that he never even had a sister. He was involved in right-wing Indian politics, and he essentially made up the story to justify his Islamophobia. It was disturbing.
In Rettinger's research, another worrying trend emerged: students also lie about their race and ethnicity in hopes of getting into better colleges. According to his study, 38% of applicants admitted to misrepresenting their race or ethnicity. Rettinger believes that this is due to larger shifts in our current culture.
"Applicants have bought into this scenario that white people are being discriminated against in college admissions, and there are forces in our culture that are selling that story regardless of whether that's true or not."
#22
Student A submitted a transcript with Student B’s name and work samples from Student C.
Also had a student submit unofficial transcripts with pen written over their grades. People review your applications. Y’all aren’t fooling AI.
#23
I used to be an AO and the one that is most common was when a student would say they had no disciplinary history but the counselor letter would say or imply otherwise.
Image credits: coral225
#24
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, called counselor to confirm.
How about you, Pandas? Have you or are you planning to embellish your college applications? And do you think there's anything wrong with including some little white lies in your essay? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!
And be sure to check out this story about a college student who wasn't allowed to graduate because she failed to contributed to a group project.
#25
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.
#26
That they were [not] dead. The mom was still in denial and sent out a ton of applications.
filledwithgonorrhea:
This seems like a good way to get into a college. Write essay saying you're dead. College "accepts" student out of pity because it's not like they can actually attend.
#27
TL;DR- Many “Prophets” coming in proclaiming to be on mission from God to deliver new books of the Bible to my wife.
My wife was an admissions counselor for a small, well-known Bible college in downtown Chicago. She got tons of crazy applications. Quite a few came in from people proclaiming things like, “I’m the Prophet Robert and I’ve been given a prophecy and written them down. I need this degree to get this added to the Bible.”
One particular time she was at work and it was towards the end of the day so most had already gone home. Well, they had a “walk-in” prospective student come to the office and wanted to meet with an admissions counselor. My wife was the only one left for the day so she went into a fairly small conference room to speak about any questions he might have about the school and how to go about the application process. This man was a middle-aged male who didn’t look out of the ordinary. About 10 minutes into their meeting this guy starts slowly going off the rails about his “testimony” (life story) even though my wife never asked for it. He starts talking about how God had been giving him visions for years of things he needed to accomplish while on earth. Apparently a small bible degree was one on a small list of things needed. My wife then sees through the window on the door behind the man a few public safety officers come in and speaking to the secretary. They then interrupt their meeting and escort the main off campus. Before he left he left a big pile of handwritten papers that were “new books of the Bible” that needed to be added.
Apparently he was on their “red flag list” because he had done this many times for about 20 years, including making extreme death threats to their counselors for not letting him into the school and once even attacked a student employee.
This is one of a long list of crazies that contact her. She has a folder of crazy emails that were too hilarious to delete from this earth.
#28
GPA or SAT scores. Obvious to look up real scores.
#29
Teacher here, not an admissions officer (I’m here because my kid is applying soon). I got a call from the guidance counselor because a student listed 4 years of a leadership role in a club I advise. Nope, that’s a lie.
First the kid tried to say they *meant* that they participated all 4 years. Um, no you didn’t. Then they confessed they didn’t think anyone would check.
Makes me wonder how many lies get through if they’re plausible.
#30
Not an AO, but I work with families as an IEC. 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.
#31
I think some of the worst I’ve seen are when they submit applications that were clearly AI and are addressed to another college. The college that they applied to isn’t even mentioned.
#32
I suppose this is a form of lying but I am "catching" more parents applying to our campus for their child; some activating their childʻs email account (and using it); and because parents have access to their childʻs college account, have accepted loans under their childʻs name.
#33
My friend wrote one about how he invented penicillin. He got accepted...
#34
I had a student who never had their application matched up with their other materials (test scores, transcripts, etc.) because the social security numbers didn't match. That's because their mother had filled out the application and written in her SSN instead.
#35
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.
#36
Lying about your race/ethnicity seems to be a really popular one.
I know several people who are 1/16th Cuban or something and mark themselves as Hispanic. It might not be a blatant lie, but it’s obviously deceptive. And this fib could get you into a school that you never would have gotten into, or earn you a scholarship you never would have received if it weren’t for that act of dishonesty.
I think it’s wrong for college admissions and scholarships to penalize students based on race, but lying to get ahead is still immoral (and risky. and stupid.).
#37
We do online interview with overseas applicants. One time there was a girl from China applying for our postgraduate programme, and she looked completely different from the passport photo she sent us. We asked her questions like where she studied her bachelor degree...She gave us answer that wasn't consistent with the information on the application form.
We can't confirm but we believed she was working for some study abroad agency and she recited the personal information of another client. Those are popular in China.
#38
I once saw a student who claimed over 1000 hours of volunteer work between Freshman and Junior year, all the while taking 8 AP classes and having an EC list of over 15 entries, each of which he was claiming he did every year in high school. It was obvious that somewhere in there, he was exaggerating. I suggested he cut back on some of the ECs he was listing because, even if they were true, having such a high number of volunteer hours as well as a high volume of time-consuming extracurriculars and a really rigorous academic schedule would definitely raise flags somewhere along the way.
#39
When I was on a peer review committee for the admissions office as a student many years ago the most common response (I won’t call it a lie) that raised questions was a list of extracurricular activities that was so long that it led most of us to believe the applicant merely signed up and didn’t participate. Certainly there might have been superstars who could meaningfully contribute to 3 sports team, Model UN, Amnesty International, Marching Band and 8 clubs but it wasn’t likely, so we were forced to more closely evaluate the applicants other assertions.
As a related aside, references really were irrelevant. We used to joke that we could take all the reference letters and shuffle them and randomly put them in any applicants folder because they were almost completely identical. References that stood out were a rarity
Rather long winded, but stick to listing activities you have a real passion for and can describe its importance to you - why did you love fencing, why couldn’t you wait until the next debate. Reality and passion land you in the admit pile of applications
#40
Fabricating the entire application. The entire thing, including lying in the interview.
#41
I’m not AO but I have a pretty funny story. The high school I went to had a pretty historic football program. The team consistently competed for a state tittle and would usually have at least one or two player from each class go D1. We had a Defensive back in my class with a few mid to lower tier D1 offers. The kid was pretty athletic but duper lazy and a horrible student, to the point where he was almost academically ineligible from playing sports every year of high school. Then all of a sudden the summer before his senior year he commits to the Naval academy. Everyone was shocked because Navy is both a much bigger more competitive program than all of his previous offers, and a school that historically is much less willing to compromise their academic standards for sport recruits than other schools.
Turns out he had photo shopped a transcript and sent it to the coach. Obviously when he had to actually officially apply to the school he was found out, and had his offer pulled. By that point all of his previous offers had moved on, and he ended up having play for a random JUCO.
