UCLA to Scrutinize Records of Some Foreign Graduate Students

UCLA officials, reflecting growing national concern about foreign students submitting fraudulent records to enroll in U.S. graduate schools, said Thursday that they will start closely scrutinizing transcripts from foreign applicants for a cluster of doctoral programs.

Campus administrators said the move, involving 11 programs in the biomedical and life-sciences fields, was prompted by the discovery of falsified records submitted by a prospective Chinese student. UCLA withdrew the student’s acceptance this spring after being tipped off via e-mail by an anonymous informant about the doctored records.

In the past, UCLA and many other American universities often did not seek to verify such records.

The students to be scrutinized “are future researchers, and scientific integrity is important to us,” said David I. Meyer, director of UCLA Access, an umbrella organization for doctoral studies in the biomedical and life sciences fields. “We want them to have impeccable credentials when they get here, and as well when they leave here.”

UCLA’s decision, disclosed Thursday by the Chronicle of Higher Education, makes it one of the first universities in the nation to acknowledge that it is taking such steps. Penn State University recently launched similar reviews of all foreign students applying to its graduate schools, and higher education groups said other universities have quietly begun such efforts or are looking into doing the same.

“This is a very serious concern of colleges and universities in the United States,” said Timothy J. McDonough, a spokesman for the American Council on Education, a group representing public and private institutions.

“It’s not only an issue of students from China. With the availability of counterfeit diplomas, and transcripts available over the Internet, this problem could become much more widespread.”

Meyer said that the tougher scrutiny of transcripts will apply to all students from foreign universities for those 11 departments, but that applicants from China have caused particular concern. He said there appears to be a widespread practice there of students putting together their own transcripts and mailing the documents themselves, rather than the universities sending the paperwork.

Although the applications are authenticated with official stamps, Meyer speculated that sometimes Chinese university officials may not know enough English to recognize fraud. In other cases, he believes, rogue entrepreneurs may be taking fees from the students in exchange for submitting authentic-looking documents to U.S. universities.

Making it more difficult to detect bogus records, some Chinese universities do not respond to transcript verification requests from U.S. universities, Meyer said.

“I’m not entirely convinced that university administrators at these places are particularly thrilled about their best graduates heading off to the United States, knowing that a large percentage of them will never come back,” he said.

Cooperation Planned

As a result, Meyer said, UCLA Access will try to establish verification procedures with the four major Chinese universities where most of its Chinese graduate students have come from: Fudan, Tsinghua, Beijing and the University of Science and Technology of China. UCLA plans to send some of its faculty working in the affected graduate programs to meet with officials at the four universities.

Meyer said UCLA also would begin reviewing the transcripts of previously admitted students. “If we find evidence of fraud, if they’ve been here three years or three months, these students will be dismissed,” he said.

He said other graduate programs at UCLA have not adopted similar measures, but all have been advised to take extra caution.

Meyer said the 11 doctoral programs have enrolled 75 new students, and they started arriving for orientation this week.

Ten of them are foreign-educated, including two from China. Others come from such countries as South Korea, Russia, Turkey, Chile and Taiwan.

After the anonymous tip, the review found that the student, from Wuhan University, had not taken seven of the courses on the transcript he submitted to UCLA. In addition, several grades had been changed, and three letters of recommendation praised him for work in courses that he had not taken. Meyer said the student, whom he did not identify, applied to UCLA while working on a master’s degree at Purdue University. After his fabrications came to light, the student was dismissed by that Indiana institution and turned away from UCLA.

A handful of foreign graduate students interviewed Thursday at UCLA said they believe the university is justified in taking additional steps to verify transcripts.

“It’s obviously a good policy to fend off an untruthful person, especially in a scientific field,” said Song Wang, 28, a fifth-year student in cellular and molecular pathology who is from China. “If someone could do that, what about their research? How could anyone trust it?”

He and others also said they were not concerned that the increased scrutiny would hurt honest students. And several said they thought it was fair that the new process will apply to all foreign students in the programs, not just those from China.

“It should be the same requirement for everyone,” said Denis Bronnikov, 25, a Russian who is in his third year of graduate studies in human genetics.

Procedures Differ

Those interviewed, from India, South Korea, China and Russia, said they were not aware of widespread cases in their home countries of students falsifying their records. But several said it was not uncommon for students in their countries to create their own transcripts because often there was no system for sending English-language transcripts to the United States.

Lan Lin, 23, a second-year pharmacology student from China, said that she and others who wanted to transfer from Beijing University had to create their transcripts, but that each step was supervised and verified by that university. There would have been no chance for any fraud, she said.

At Penn State, Eva J. Pell, vice president for research and dean of the graduate school, said applications from foreign university graduates to all of her school’s graduate programs have received closer scrutiny over the past two years.

She said her admissions staff has turned up three or four cases of fraud, most or all of which involved Chinese students.

Higher education experts noted that the UCLA controversy comes amid rising concerns about possible cheating by foreign students on entrance exams. The Educational Testing Service recently alerted U.S. campuses that scores on the Graduate Record Examinations from China, South Korea and Taiwan may have been inflated by cheating.