119. True crime: Admissions fraud

0:02 Welcome back, dear listeners, to the EAIE podcast. This is episode 119, and today we're taking our first ever dive into some true crime territory as we endeavor to unpack some of the complex realities surrounding fraud in international commission. I'm your host, Laura Rumpley, the EAIE's Director for Knowledge Development and Research, and we're so happy you're spending some time with us as we explore this fascinating topic with our three guests who are deeply familiar with this subject matter.

0:35 Amy Kawa is Director of Evaluation Services at Educational Credential Evaluators, also known as ECE. She's based in the United States. Muriel Poisson joined us from her office in Paris, where she is Team Leader Knowledge Generation and Mobilization at UNESCO's Institute for Educational Planning. Amongst other responsibilities, Muriel is the task manager of the Institute's Capacity Building Program on Ethics and Corruption in Education.

1:07 And Elena Denisova-Schmidt is based at Sangalen University in Switzerland. She's been involved in research on fraud and corruption in higher education around the world for more than 15 years. And just this year, she received the European Network for Academic Integrity's Exemplary Research Award in recognition of her contributions to research on academic integrity and corruption in higher education.

1:33 The conversation kicked off with Amy Kawa, offering us an indication of some of the most common forms of fraud and key trends in this area. From her perspective, working at an organization that provides direct frontline support to admissions professionals.

1:50 I can actually kind of speak from two different perspectives. So, first, working for an independent credential evaluation organization. Common types of fraud that we see include altered or completely fabricated documents, including academic transcripts or diplomas, but we also see completely legitimate documents that have been purchased from a vendor and altered.

2:14 We also happen to see misrepresented educational histories where a student may not be completely honest about the education that they have completed. And that makes it a little more challenging for us as well. There are also kinds of fraud that are conducted through third-party agents or consultants who submit misleading or fraudulent documents on behalf of students.

2:37 So it is something that we challenged with every day. One of the biggest challenges for us as a credential evaluation organization is that the United States has over 5,000 institutions and there are really no universal standards. Each institution is autonomous. They make their own decisions on what documents they require, what format those documents are in, and what they accept for admission purposes.

3:04 At ECE, we see all different levels of institutions and different types of programs. So there's a lot of variety. Obviously, countries around the world and institutions worldwide also use different formatting and different security features. So there's just a lot of opportunity for different things to be falsified or fraudulent.

3:26 Beyond just the academic documents, though, I think that international admissions officers battle other types of fraud. It can appear in other ways that not just necessarily academic documents. But we have heard from some of our partners about fraudulent English language testing scores. Either that the student has falsified the score report itself, or it could be a situation where they send someone on their behalf and to attempt to impersonate them in the testing center, trying to obtain better English language results.

4:02 We've also heard about financial fraud. So students who or parents or agents who falsify funding and banking documents for their students. And then, of course, also just fraudulent evaluation reports themselves, where we have received ECE reports that are not actually our reports. And we can identify them pretty quickly.

4:27 We know what our reports are supposed to look like. Yeah, so it really is something that is all around the whole process of international student admissions. Speaking of trends, I guess I would say one of the major trends is that fraud is becoming increasingly sophisticated and harder to detect. Historically, we maybe saw more obvious document alterations, at-home attempts to mimic official seals and signatures using software like Photoshop or even on handwritten documents attempting to change a grade from one number to another.

5:01 But now we see more and more digital tools that are allowing more professional and harder to detect situations. For some examples, we've uncovered some dummy portals where they look almost exactly like the official portal that's used to authenticate documents. The URL may have one letter different or may have a punctuation mark where it shouldn't be.

5:26 We've also seen fake QR codes on documents that don't actually lead us to the verification or the trusted site or the trusted results. So more and more we're we're seeing a way of false, a trend of falsifying the way in which we receive documents, not just the documents themselves, which is, you know, obviously very challenging.

5:48 So I guess I would say the prevalence of fabricated websites or email spoofing, digital forgeries are all really lowering the barrier of creating convincing application materials, which is kind of scary. But I would say that it's not all doom and gloom. Um digitization tools are certainly improving and becoming more sophisticated, but so are our tools that we use to catch them.

6:14 Brilliant. So it sounds like really there are just many different ways that fraud can play out, evolving ways, um, really quite a landscape of possibilities. But nice to know that you, you know, also see um silver lining in the sense that it's not all doom and gloom. Exactly. You've mentioned very specifically digital uh technologies, and I wonder if I could jump to Muriel on this question.

6:37 New technologies, AI. Um, from your perspective, where you sit at UNESCO, do you feel digitalization has made fraud easier? Is it is it making it harder somehow to get past institutions, or are both things going on?

6:53 Well, I think very clearly, and I think my response will be very much in line of what we've just heard from uh Amy. Well, very clearly, new technologies, including AI, have a huge impact uh on the issue of uh admission uh fraud. And in fact, university admission officers worldwide, as we just heard, are currently on the very forefront of this major technological shift that we see happening in all uh regions, a shift towards 100% digital applications combined with the rapid generalizations of AI, contributing to completely reshuffle uh this domain of uh admission uh of admission fraud.

7:31 And so, in fact, if we look at this issue from my perspective, well, digitalization has two quite opposite effects. And we just uh heard that, in fact, uh, from the uh presentation of uh Amy. At individual level, it contributes in a way what we could uh call uh to democratize fraud, uh, but at the very same time also it provides higher education stakeholders with new and very powerful verification tools that can serve as a strong deterrent to fraud and that can ultimately have some significant preventive effect against uh fraudulent uh practices.

8:09 So I can maybe provide a few more details uh on both aspects if you agree, Lohan. But if we if we talk about democratization of admission frauds, well, there are plenty of examples to share, and we heard already a number of those. Uh clearly digital documents, we know that it has now become much easier to alter a PDF transcript or to create a fake language certificate, for instance, uh, using advanced uh image uh software.

8:35 Uh Gen AI assisted writing. Well, in the past we know that some students were paying a ghostwriter or a paper mill to help them draft the personal statement. But today, well, tools such as ChatGPT can generate structured writing, good language immediately and for free. Uh online admission tests with the normalizations of remote admission testing.

8:56 Uh, some candidates now can use hidden screen sharing software, invisible ear PCs to get real-time support from a third party, so in a much more sophisticated way than the old traditional ways to do that. And admission interviews. It seems now that there are even emerging cases whereby some candidates use AI-driven video filters or deep fakes to impersonate someone else during some video conference uh admission uh interviews.

9:24 But as I mentioned, we also have very good examples demonstrating how digital tools and AI can also offer at the very same time the new and powerful verification tools for identity verification. We know that impersonation is a big issue when we're talking about the admission process. But now, before submitting the final applications, taking an admission test, many platforms now require a passport scan combined with live facial recognitions to prove the candidate's identity, as an example, credentials and verifications of credentials are easier sometimes to cheat and to forge at the level of individual, but at the very same time, some universities also taking the lead and increasingly relying on

10:06 secure document exchange networks, blockchain technology, which is much more difficult to forge. AI proctoring. Well, we know with the COVID pandemic that there are many also ethical issues attached to this kind of uh new uh digital developments, but also well, this is sometimes uh something that is used during online entrance exams to monitor candidates via uh the webcams.

10:30 And the last evolutions related to this uh digital uh revolution I wanted to mention is AI-driven data auditing. And I think this is a major evolution that allows now university to cross-reference uh applicants' entire data footprint using AI to detect some inconsistencies between different pieces of their uh application.

10:54 So uh Laura, to come back to your initial question, uh uh has digitalizations method easier, harder, or both? I think maybe the questions could be reformulated as follows. Well, how far are higher education institutions equipped to address such evolutions? There are important entry costs for them to do so in terms of equipment, staff, capacity development, and so on.

11:17 And so my perspective on this is that much will depend on the segment of the higher education sector you are talking about. I mean large public universities, for instance, versus small private higher education institutions which are not regarded as part of the elite. And according to the segment of the higher education sector we are talking about, then maybe capacities to address fraud may grow, or on the contrary, be largely reduced uh in future, highlighting the importance of national authorities in supporting such a transformation across the sector through adequate frameworks, guidance, tools, training for a coherent and coordinated response from the higher education sector uh at the whole.

11:59 Excellent. Okay, so this is a really interesting high-level picture of you know what's going on in the digital space, new technologies, and you know, potential ways of addressing that. Shortly here, I'd like to draw Elena into this conversation based on her experience as a researcher of fraud. But before we get to that, I just want to come back to Amy.

12:18 Muriel has mentioned this notion of you know possible responses by institutions. I wonder if we could jump to you to give us some examples of good practice that institutions might realistically adopt, just depending on, you know, um, well, maybe even regardless of size or resources.

12:37 Yeah, absolutely. Um, there are a lot of practices that are achievable, whether you're a one-person office or a huge um institution with a lot of resources and a lot of money. Um of the most important things is being able to verify high-risk documents directly with the issuing institution whenever possible.

12:58 Often we at ECE find reliable contact information on the university's website or through a ministry of education or other governmental sources. We track the requests that we send, the amount of time it takes to receive a response, and who we actually received a reply from and keep a database of that.

13:19 So we kind of know who can be trusted to provide responses about documents that may be questionable. I would highly, highly recommend regular trainings. Um, as Muriel said, there are so many different types of fraud and so many new technologies and new ways of submitting fraudulent documents. Um, some are country specific, some are not.

13:43 Um, so just knowing what technologies exist and how to identify them is really important. Um, we hold regular trainings and updates for our evaluation team. And usually it's a combination of either internal, where we have an expert on our staff who learns and researches a new trend and then shares it with everyone else.

14:04 Um, other times we learn from other uh practitioners either throughout the US or uh worldwide at conferences or webinars, external trainings. So those are really, really great strategies to try to help combat fraud. Um, we also conduct regular reviews of our documentation requirements for every country.

14:26 Typically or historically, we have required the most secure documents reasonably possible to get from a particular country. Um, nowadays, we are looking for more and more digitally transmitted documents as there are often more security features and more secure ways of getting those documents to us via API or other transmission portals, things like that.

14:54 So, you know, on the one hand, it's great that we are able to catch fraudulent documents, but really our overall goal is to reduce the number that get to us in the first place. We want it to be harder for students to send fraudulent documents. I think the the most one of the most important things is being able to share that information, whether it's internally or externally with other colleagues.

15:16 So sharing documenting decisions that you make, documenting questionable or confirmed falsified documents, and sharing them with your own staff so they know kind of what to look out for, or sharing them externally with other colleagues and university partners. Like we said, you know, we keep track of formatting changes and official signatures over time.

15:40 So we know from what time period from a particular university who should be signing that official document. And if it is not the same person, we may look at it a little bit closer, or we may contact the institution for verification directly. And then outside of our own internal practices, knowing that it's it's a good idea to contact colleagues from other organizations.

16:01 There are professional associations like EAIE who are just such a great network of um experts in the field. And so reaching out to people and sharing that knowledge and data, um, it's just so, so very important.

16:16 This is extremely helpful, those very practical dimensions. I don't know if if any other anyone else in the group would like to chime in with any examples from their perspective. But thank you, Amy. That's really, really useful. Um, we've talked a lot now about sort of these very practical um frontline experiences with this topic.

16:34 I'd like to turn now to Elena, who's made a career actually of researching the phenomenon of fraud and corruption, um, to get a bit of a sense of what the research on this subject tells us about the prevalence of admissions fraud globally, and potentially also where are some of the biggest evidence gaps in our understanding of fraud in this area?

16:54 Elena, over to you. Yeah, thank you, Laura. Yeah, academic literature suggests that um academic fraud, admission fraud takes place at different types of institutions in different countries. It's not only international students. It might uh happen almost everywhere. And from my perspective as a researcher working on this particular topic, um I would like to say uh there are usually two types of cheating.

17:20 One type of cheating is individual cheating. Students cheat on exams or tests or provide falsified materials, as Amy mentioned. There are different types of materials important for admission. For example, um academic achievements, non-academic achievements, internships that never took place. Yeah, and also it's one type of cheating, and another type of cheating, it's more organized cheating.

17:47 Students work with professionals, with agents, yeah, with consultants, helping them to cheat the system. For example, another person can take an exam for a student, or another person can prepare a motivation later, or even professional company can help to polish a student portfolio. There are many different things, yeah.

18:08 And from the perspective of research, uh from my perspective as a researcher, it's very important to understand the reasons behind. It's not usually bad people, yeah. There are many, many different reasons behind. One of the reasons it might be that students compensate for their very bad secondary school education.

18:30 Um, they, these young people might be from less privileged families, um from regions with not so very good secondary schools, or from countries with no alternatives to higher education. The young people believe that higher education is the only way to get a job. Yeah, that's why they do everything they can do in order to receive a degree.

18:53 Uh, it might be something completely different reasons. Uh recently I saw several examples in Australia on international students. International students were involved and were admitted using different questionable practices, but they were students only on paper. They were involved in different kinds of businesses on very poor conditions, and students, young people, they did not even dare to protest or even to call back home and to ask for help.

19:22 Yeah. It's really, it's really very complex. Um, also from the research perspective, I would like to stress it's very important to have all stakeholders in view. Talking about students, um, they're usually young people, very young people in some countries, even uh in the age under 18. Everything they do or do not do, they usually discuss with their families.

19:48 It's usually parents who advise them, recommend them, even force them to do something. That's very important to have, uh to take a look, to take a more closer look at parents. And many of us still remember the case from the United States. It was in 2019, very famous scandal, uh, Varsity Blue Scandal.

20:09 Uh, do you remember? It was um several young students were admitted to very prestigious universities, young people from very famous families. And parents uh played a very important role. And many of you still remember what kind of techniques were used. One technique was manipulation on entrance exam.

20:31 And the second technique it was use manipulation, uh, false materials on as sport achievements, sometimes in situations without any sport backgrounds, in order to be admitted as student athletes. Yeah, very interesting um opportunity in many very prestige uh universities in the United States. I think it's really very important also to think about parents.

20:55 I think that's extremely fascinating to really try and um unpack all the motivations behind this kind of behavior and perhaps to consider that these are not just black and white cases, but rather ones that really are fraught with uh different kinds of motivations and pressures, you know, on the actors involved.

21:13 Thank you for that, Elena. Along those lines of kind of stepping out of a black and white understanding of the phenomenon, I imagine that there are also some misconceptions that practitioners might have about admissions fraud. And I wonder if if Amy, you might be able to put your finger on some of those for us to help us understand that a little bit better.

21:33 I'd be happy to. Yeah, I think Elena mentioned a couple of them already that um come to mind for me. And one is that most fraud is committed by individual students acting alone. We know that's not the case. Um we know that there are organized networks or agents, commercial services, um, people, other people um acting on behalf of a student who may be falsifying documents or um falsifying.

22:00 Some part of the process. I think some of the other the biggest one, um, maybe the biggest myth is that fraud is easy to spot. Um, as we talked about earlier, with new technologies coming around every day, um, things are becoming more sophisticated. It's more difficult to um see on a physical document or on an electronic document.

22:23 The the new features of um falsifying things are making it easier for documents to survive a routine review. We're seeing a lot less of the more of the obvious Photoshop um or home computer uh falsifications. Um, and they're just more complex changes to documents and where they're coming from. I think another big myth is that fraud only exists in certain countries.

22:49 We know that's not true either. Fraud happens everywhere in the world. Um, no country is immune. Of course, there are different risk factors that impact particular countries, um, market pressures, incentives, like we talked about, um, or challenges rather than just nationality alone. Um, over a recent five-year period, ECE actually tracked um ECE and other NACI's members.

23:14 Nacy's is an organization of credential evaluation services in the United States. And over five years, we together have reported confirmed fraud from over 111 different countries. So it is really truly a global issue. And I think maybe the final myth that I'll mention is, you know, sometimes we think that technology will solve the problem.

23:37 And we know that that's not necessarily the case either. You know, technology helps, you know, as we talked about, the ways of providing fraudulent documents are more sophisticated, but so are our ways to detect them. But we still need the human judgment. We still need the processes to verify documents.

23:54 Um, we still need institutional cooperation. So we need to keep our staff trained to review security features on original documents, um, read email headers and detect spoofed emails, um, maintaining resources of confirmed authentic and fraudulent documents from around the world and make sure that we're comparing them.

24:16 Really, really helpful. I think it's um so interesting to bring the reality of fraud into this conversation uh in international education, one in which I think we operate with such um, in many ways, rose-colored glasses about the the good that international education does in the world, and it certainly does an enormous amount of good.

24:34 But running alongside that, there are nefarious actors and there are people who are doing things that are not, you know, within the bounds of the rules. So, to thank you all so much for all the different ways that you've helped us understand that. We have a certain reality today, and my last question for all of you is to cast your minds into the future a bit and uh leave us with some impressions that you have about how fraud in admissions might evolve in the next couple of years.

25:01 What might we be on the lookout for? And how would you characterize your level of optimism or pessimism that institutions can really stay ahead of these increasingly sophisticated fraud methods? I'd love to hear from each of you on that point, if I may. And maybe I'll start with Muriel.

25:17 Uh yeah, thanks, uh Laura. Well, uh, looking ahead, uh, to me, what could be called this cat and mouse uh game uh between uh dishonest applicants and that it's not only individuals that we're talking about, but it can be a whole uh network and uh ecosystem of stakeholders uh behind and admission officers is only going to accelerate uh in future.

25:40 Uh and as generative AI becomes more and more difficult to distinguish from human outputs, well, universities clearly will have to fundamentally change the process to select and to admit uh students uh in uh in future. And so uh I think that the overarching trend, even if technology, I fully agree with Amy, is not going to solve uh all issues, but it will still help make the verification of hard facts such as identity or grades more automated and secure, uh, and gradually the practice of requesting, for instance, sending PDFs or paper trombs being replaced by other approaches such as self-sovereign identity, SSI, verifiable credentials, development of digital wallets and uh and so on.

26:25 But at the very same time, such an evolution should force universities to rely much more on human judgment, as it was just mentioned, and also maybe live interactions uh with candidates, which is of course difficult in this area of international higher education uh to organize, but still, and perhaps in a counter-intuitive way.

26:47 Well, for uh higher education institutions committed to merit, human interactions may uh regain a central place in the admission process at some point, with interviews serving as a means to assess really students' critical thinking, communication skills, others, thereby helping to safeguard the very principles of transparency, integrity, equity, trust that lie at the very heart of higher education uh DNA.

27:16 But we are uh well clearly on the eve of uh of all of this.

27:20 Brilliant. Thank you, Muriel. Elena, what does your crystal ball tell you about the future in this area?

27:27 Well, it's always difficult to look into a crystal ball and predict what might happen next. But I think from a research perspective, one thing is really important. We should avoid stigmatizing certain groups like international students or pointing fingers at particular countries. We need to ask why admission fraud happens, what are the pressures behind it, and what makes people behave in certain ways, and why are attitudes towards these practices sometimes so divined.

27:59 I also think it's really important to keep the conversation going on this topic and bring different perspectives together. Scholars, practitioners, universities, international organizations like our podcast today.

28:14 Thank you, Elena. And Amy, what's the final word from your perspective?

28:18 I think both Muriel and Elena had um really good insights into what um the reality is and what the future could hold. But, you know, as we said before, I think admissions fraud will likely continue to become more difficult to identify through our traditional means of document review. Um we can expect more sophisticated digital forgeries and more AI-generated content.

28:43 So, you know, trying to figure out how to combat that is really the challenge. Um, but despite the challenges and kind of that pessimistic view, I think there are still reasons for optimism. Institutions are investing more in stronger verification systems, um, international cooperation is increasing, and policymakers are emphasizing monitoring and countering education fraud.

29:09 Uh, I think as we move towards more digital credentials and ways of delivering documents digitally more securely, those offer some more longer-term advantages over the traditional paper-based system. Um, so like I mentioned before, the goal is really not to eliminate fraud completely. Uh, I don't think that's ever possible, but the goal is really to make fraud harder, more expensive, and more likely to be detected while maintaining fair and accessible admissions practices for all legitimate students.

29:41 So, as every as we identify every fraudulent document, that creates a space for a student who is deserving and qualified for admission into an institution.

29:52 Thank you very much for those final thoughts, Amy. I think Elena said, um, you know, it's important to keep the conversation going, and I can't tell you how much I've enjoyed this conversation, really learning so much from all three of you from your different perspectives. It's been very educational, and I want to thank you on behalf of the EA Podcast for being with me today.

30:10 Thank you. That was Mirel Poisson, team leader knowledge generation and mobilization at UNESCO's Institute for Educational Planning, Elena Denisoba-Schmidt, a Sangalan University-based researcher on fraud and corruption in higher education, and Amy Kawa, Director of Evaluation Services and Educational Credential Evaluators in the U.S.

30:34 We hope you've enjoyed listening to and learning from their expert perspectives on admissions fraud around the world. It's a sobering topic, but such an important one, as colleagues everywhere work to ensure the integrity of admissions policies, procedures, and practices. As always, for more information, please do take a look at the notes we've published with this episode, which feature links to some resources relevant to the topic of our conversation.

31:01 At the EAIE, we keep the conversation going in lots of ways. And if you have an idea, a challenge, or a story that you'd like to add to the mix, now is the right time to act if you want to be a part of the program for the EAIE's annual conference in Lisbon in 2027. The final days to submit a session proposal and become a speaker are here.

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32:36 We'll be back soon with the next edition of the podcast. This will feature a compelling conversation about kind leadership, with the episode perfectly timed for release on World Kindness Day, which is 13 November. Please be kind to us by liking and sharing us with your networks. We kindly thank you. And until next time, all good wishes to you from the EAIE.