Co-written by Kristin Chang
She remembered every lie she’d ever told.
Or at least the big ones: the one whole semester of elementary school she claimed to be a robot. The time she lied to her grandmother about being accepted into a prestigious science camp. All the times she said she was walking to her after-school math program and just never showed up.
All these lies, and so many more, flashed before her eyes, like something out of a cliché action movie. But there was no time to think about it now. She clicked submit, then shut her laptop abruptly. Then she opened it back up. The Common Application still glowed on her screen, unsubmitted. There was one last window that popped up, one last box she had to check: a guarantee that everything on her application was true.
Out of all the lies she had ever told, the anonymous senior’s college application was the biggest. By far. She hadn’t fudged or tweaked any numbers — fabricating her GPA or her involvement with a club could be easily proved false with one phone call to the school — but on the non-academic sections of the app, demographics were an appealing loophole.
And so, on her 650 word Common Application essay, the senior mentioned, in one of six paragraphs, a grueling and soul-searching struggle with her sexuality. Specifically, her bisexuality. A half-dozen sentences just vague enough to be plausible: about her family’s close-mindedness (true), her anxiety at school (plausible) and her sleepless nights filled with worries of the future (true as well).
But the truth is that she isn’t bisexual. Or at least she doesn’t identify as that. As a lie, it’s clean: there’s no way to verify sexuality, and it’s not as bad, she believes, as lying about race. She admits her lie seems coldly logical, maybe a little too methodical, but that’s what she believes the college process does.
“It’s about how you look on paper,” she said. “Everything’s on paper, your race and your gender too, so those aspects seem also very objective…like something to be judged the same way as grades.”
Her friend once joked that “All’s fair in love and college apps,” and though the senior agrees that this may seem true, it probably shouldn’t be. The lie was easy for her, she admits, precisely because she’s never had to come to terms with her sexuality. She felt like an actor, claiming the identity but not truly living it.
According to a survey of 335 students, 30 percent of people believed that it was morally worse to lie about grades and extracurriculars, compared to 21 percent who believed that it was morally worse to lie about identity.
According to the senior, this isn’t surprising: her own friends believe that lying about demographics is more permissible than faking extracurriculars. She herself is less sure. She thinks about how she’s never had to come out. How she’s never had to question her attraction to someone. Compared to lying about her hours of community service, this lie seemed insensitive at best.
For months, the senior spent hours on online forums, from Reddit to College Confidential, her heart thudding every single time she clicked on a thread titled “Lying on college apps.” Some were from Asian students who had marked Pacific Islander as their race. Some were from students who lied about having an illness.
Many were prefaced with phrases like “Please help” and “Got caught,” and most comments seemed preachy to her, almost suspiciously so. “Don’t do it,” they said, while in the same paragraph stating that they had considered it as well.
Two things were overwhelmingly clear to her. First, no one doubted that lying would give them a boost. And second, she wasn’t the only one who had lied.
More than a box to check off
According to senior Priyanka Agarwal, it’s all too common to joke about faking your race or gender to boost your application. Yet beneath the joking tone lurks something else entirely.
“A guy might say, ‘You’re a girl, you’re in engineering, that’s probably why you got into a school, and a guy that’s as qualified as you doesn’t get in,’” Agarwal said. “There is a little bit of resentment when a guy talks about a girl with the same statistics as [him] getting in.”
The problem with joking about applying as a girl, Agarwal believes, is that it can invalidate people with that actual identity. Being a girl means more than just a box to check off: it means that Agarwal was one of the few girls in her JAVA class. It means that a girl’s often had to work harder to achieve the same recognition. Even if a girl in the STEM field may have lower grades and scores than her male counterparts, to see someone’s statistics without factoring in their identity doesn’t seem fair.
“People’s experiences are important,” Agarwal said. “There is a need for girls in engineering. [When you lie] there’s a lack of appreciation for how someone’s experiences have played a really big role in their life.”
And though Agarwal can understand exactly why someone might lie about their identity, she also can’t ignore how that discredits all the hidden influences on a person’s education. So when a guy says that a girl has been accepted to a school just because she’s a girl, Agarwal can detect the root of their resentment: they believe that the system is unfair to them.
But according to the anonymous senior, that’s easy to say when you’ve got none of the baggage of that actual identity. To her, the people who complain the most about a rigged system are the people that benefit the most from that system.
Like Agarwal, guidance counselor Clay Stiver believes that lying to colleges is ultimately worse for the student than for the college. Not only are their legal repercussions, such as colleges withdrawing their acceptances, but it’s also harmful to students’ self-confidence. Stiver has encountered a few a incidents in which biracial students have omitted information about their race.
“For example, a student who’s half Japanese and half white will just put Japanese. I’ve seen that happen,” Stiver said. But in the end, Stiver tries to instill one message: Be honest.
“Just present the information. That’s what integrity is, to me. It’s being true to yourself and telling the truth,” Stiver said.
According to Senior Charles Chen, the desire to lie stems from applicants feeling pressured to stand out.
“Some people looking at their application they might not see that much of the extracurricular stuff,” Chen said, “so they’re racking their brains trying to find anything that they can just throw on there that might possibly get them a better chance of getting accepted.”
The desperation that students feel to get accepted into colleges is just sad, according to Chen.
“You have to sacrifice personal identity just to go that next stage in life, and that really shouldn’t happen in society,” Chen said.
Worth it
The anonymous senior couldn’t sleep. She was restless, twitchy. She wondered why she had lied in the first place: to seem worthy? To seem unique? But in the end, she’d done something hardly unique at all: lie.
It was her own conscience, and good luck, that pushed her to withdraw her Common Application from the two private schools to which she had submitted. She didn’t need the Common App anymore: she’d committed to a public school, though even as she was celebrating, she didn’t quite feel worthy of it. Not because of guilt, which she admits might’ve actually just been her fear of being caught, but because she felt wearied by the whole process. Would the lie even have made a difference? Would it even have been worth it?
Even now, when she hears the pinging alert sound of her email, her mind flashes back to the lie she told. Her inbox is now flooded with congratulations for her acceptance, with future plans and the promise of starting anew. But she can’t help but think it isn’t much of a victory.
