Yu Xi - Conning Harvard: The True Story of the Con Artist Who Faked His Way into the Ivy League (Additional reporting)

This book chronicles an academic fraud of stunning proportions. Over a period of six years, Adam B. Wheeler tricked the smartest institutions in the country time and time again. He plagiarized application essays to get into one of the countrys best liberal arts colleges. He stole a Pulitzer Prize winners work to win a poetry prize. Then he took on Harvard Universitythe worlds most recognized institution of higher education, whose very name has meant prestige, privilege, excellence, and exclusivity for centuries.

Adam Wheeler was an expert forger and a skillful liar with seemingly few scruples about fabricating his academic credentials whenever the occasion arose. In snagging admission to Harvard, he unfairly attained an honor that millions of students worldwide dream of. In striving to scam institutions at the pinnacle of higher educationYale, Brown, Stanford, the Rhodes and Fulbright scholarships, and morehe astonished the nation with the story of his audacity. Many were outraged that he took a precious spot at Harvard that could have gone to an honest applicant, not to mention thousands of dollars in prizes that selection committees could have bestowed on deserving young scholars. Others were impressed by his skillful cons or even smugly amused to see Harvard outsmarted for once.

But whether one perceives him as the hero or the villain of his tale, this ultimately is not about Adam Wheeler. His fraudulent path is extraordinary, but on its own, his story is unimportant.

What is important is that high school students today face unprecedented pressure when it comes to college admissions. What is important is that as many as 14 percent of essays are plagiarized, 50 percent of transcripts are faked, and 90 percent of recommendation letters are forged among some groups of college applicants. What is important is that a generation of teenagers, raised in an educational system that emphasizes standardized testing and in an age of abundant technological options for untruthfulness, cheats on tests and homework with shocking frequency. As the pressure to win an ever-more-elusive ticket to a top-tier college ratchets higher each year, college admissions could be facing a crisis of honesty.

Far more than a victimless hoax, deception on an application is a violation of ethical and often legal precepts that affects the larger community. In the absence of integrity, a diploma is a meaningless piece of paper on the wall, a mockery of true intellectual achievement. To anyone who has ever been tempted to inflate some details on a rsum, to scribble answers on his hand or peek over her classmates shoulder, to pass off writing downloaded from the Internet as original, or to ink in a plus next to a grade on a transcriptthis book is a cautionary tale.