An article was originally posted to Helium Network on January 21, 2014.
Helium went offline, so I reposted it here on July 4, 2014.
On December 23, 2024, I cut back what had been posted here and published a new version in Books Are Our Superpower.
"Conning Harvard" is the tale of Adam Wheeler, a student of middling capabilities who faked his way into Harvard University and nearly secured a treasured Rhodes Scholarship. The book was capably written by Julie Zauzmer (Harvard '13), an undergrad student reporter at the campus newspaper The Crimson. Zauzmer began reporting on the scandal when the story broke in 2010; the book was published at the beginning of her senior year.
Lessons
Zauzmer says she wrote a "cautionary tale" in a climate of college admissions in which, across all colleges, plagiarism and lies can supposedly be found in 14 percent of essays, half of transcripts and nearly all recommendation letters.It's hard to catch plagiarists. Harvard admissions does raise eyebrows at writing samples that seem "too good," especially relative to other grades and scores, but it's too time-consuming to fact-check every credential from every institution for every person. After all, Harvard received over 30,000 applications to the Class of 2016.
People who only want to claim a credential may just photocopy a diploma. Of people who, by contrast, pretend to be college students or gain admission by fraud, Zauzmer notes that they can be motivated by family pressure, narcissism or the desire for the college experience.
One observation that, had it been included, might have improved the book - although it surely would have upset some at her university - is that Wheeler leveraged a certain style of academic writing that can be so obfuscating that even scholars in the field won't admit to suspecting that a certain passage might be nonsense, not wishing to reveal themselves as unable to understand it. Wheeler was so good at fictionalizing his life and amalgamating passages, he might legitimately have become a novelist. That he chose fake literary criticism rather than honest creative writing, and that he succeeded for a long time in doing so, is a potentially damning indictment of English departments everywhere.
Zauzmer did not interview Wheeler himself or speculate about his deeper motivations. She interviewed people who knew him, but not his close friends or family. By the time the story broke, Wheeler was already in legal trouble. Her book is probably better off without introducing the confusion of whatever Wheeler's version of events might have been or however he might have rationalized his actions. The facts reported by others create a story that speaks for itself.
Zauzmer also avoids giving any strong recommendation about how to avoid passing through blatant fabrications like Wheeler's in the future. It is hard to imagine a solution. Students and faculty can't check the resume of even a small fraction of their colleagues. Besides, informal "resume checks" are notoriously slanted by the prejudice that one is likely to be unqualified based on race, gender or background, and in this regard, these "checks" serve more as social weapons than as quests for truth.
Perhaps a plagiarism check could be most efficiently achieved if it were centralized at the level of each student's Common App before the application is distributed to dozens of colleges. On the other hand, encouraging multiple reviewers downstream increases the likelihood that plagiarism will be detected. What ultimately caught Wheeler's lies at Bowdoin and Harvard was not a computer program, but professors who noticed that his work sounded too good or too familiar and who realized that they personally knew the real author. In other words, it was the attention and commitment of genuinely educated scholars - something for which there is still no substitute.
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