Crafting a future

ABOUT 1,000 students from China each year compete for a handful of slots at Harvard, Yale and a few of the other most prestigious universities in America, say education consultants. This annual contest creates a lucrative market. Parents pay fees of as much as 180,000 yuan to 300,000 yuan ($29,000 to $48,000) to American and Chinese companies to help polish their children’s applications for Ivy League universities. But some prefer to take what they hope will be a short cut.

Unscrupulous agents abound in China, offering to produce fake grades and recommendation letters and write students' essays. They even assume students' identities in e-mail correspondence with universities. Some agents charge fees (of up to 100,000 yuan, or $16,000) only if a client's application for a "top 50" American university is successful. Sometimes candidates' first direct contact with a university is when they receive an acceptance notice.

The cheating goes well beyond embellishing credentials. Some students pay for advance copies of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), which is used by American universities to assess applicants, or even pay for the correct answers as well. In recent months the College Board, a New York-based consortium of academic institutions which oversees the SAT, has on several occasions delayed the release of the results of exams sat by students from China, pending investigations of cheating by an unknown number of them. Most of the students have since received their scores, or are expected to receive them eventually.

Detecting cheating by Chinese candidates is a challenge for admissions officers in America, at a time when the numbers of such applicants are soaring (see story). Obio Ntia, a former admissions officer at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, says his colleagues uncovered one scam involving two dozen students who applied using the same home address. Even honest candidates need careful scrutiny. High scores in the SAT may suggest the applicants have crammed for that exam but lack other skills, a phenomenon so common that there is a Chinese phrase for it: gaofen dineng—high score, low ability. Some American universities pay special attention to the huge numbers of applicants with high scores, to minimise the risk of being duped.

Worries about cheats have spawned a new industry. Two companies in Beijing started by Americans, InitialView and Vericant, as well as the Council on International Educational Exchange, an American NGO, offer to conduct video interviews with candidates in China to help American universities get a better understanding of the students. Rick Clark, director of undergraduate admission at Georgia Institute of Technology, says that in 2014 22% of Chinese applicants who submitted such a video were admitted, compared with only 7% of candidates who did not.

An increasing number of universities conduct their own interviews of applicants via Skype, an internet-telephony service, or in person in China. Some recruit Chinese alumni to help them. Mr Clark believes having a video on file for later is also wise. Some of his peers, he says, believe that students have shown up on campus who were not the same as the people they spoke to on Skype, or even face-to-face. "There’s a crisis of trust", says Tomer Rothschild, an American who co-founded Elite Scholars of China, a Beijing-based tutoring company. Elite Scholars screens potential clients to gauge their suitability for admission to American universities. It rejected more than half of them in 2014, Mr Rothschild says. The firm tells admissions officers which applicants it has helped.

One of them is Jin Zhengtao, 17, who attends a prestigious secondary school in Beijing. A film buff who calls himself Skywalker in English, Mr Jin approached Elite Scholars for help with his applications to American universities, including Yale and the University of Chicago. He says he did not study hard for the SAT exam, but scored an impressive 2,320 out of a possible 2,400. He then took Mr Rothschild's advice and went to Serbia for the summer to study the language and pursue his love of east European cinema. Mr Jin's quirky approach to burnishing his CV may have helped him. He has been accepted by Chicago and is waiting to hear from Yale.