Back
in February I wrote a post after Flagler College in Florida became the most
recent college admitting that admissions statistics have been misreported. Several weeks ago Flagler released an outside
investigative report commissioned by its Board of Trustees that answers in ugly
detail the question raised every time there is a new report of a college
misreporting admissions data. “How could
this happen?”
The
answer at Flagler is “intentional data fraud and misreporting” at the hands of
a single individual, former Vice President for Enrollment Management Marc
Williar. Williar, an admissions staff
member for 25 years and the VP since 2009, resigned back in February, taking
full responsibility for the data fraud. According to the report, forensic
accounting analysis indicates that the fraud goes back at least to 2005, much
earlier than acknowledged by Williar.
What
is different about the Flagler case is that the data fraud involves
manipulation of individual student records, not just the freshman class profile. The report accuses Williar of accessing the
electronic database maintained by Flagler for student records to inflate and
even fabricate test scores for individual students. How widespread was the fraud? Williar is accused of inflating test scores
for 2542 students in 2012 and 2013 alone and fabricating 195 others. The reports states that 99% of the scores
entered into the database by Williar over that two-year period were inaccurate. Apparently no one else on the Flagler campus
was involved or even aware of the data manipulation.
The
forensic accounting analysis during the investigation didn’t find any “formula”
by which scores were manipulated, but it appears that Williar started by determining
the class mean he wanted to achieve, then added 50 or 100 points to SAT subscores
for individual students. He inflated
class rank statistics by omitting low class ranks. The inflation in the SAT profile on the 1600
scale for entering Flagler classes was approximately 25 points from 2004-2007,
50 points from 2008-2010, and 85 points over the past three years.
Some
takeaways, both questions and conclusions:
1)
I
applaud Flagler for publicly releasing the report. The transparency serves Flagler, the
admissions profession, and the public.
2)
It
is tempting to think of admissions data manipulation as a victimless crime,
hurting only the credibility of U.S. News’s
college rankings, but at Flagler the data fraud hurt individual students. At least several hundred students were
misplaced in courses because of the changed individual SAT scores, and in fact
that was what led to discovery of the fraud, as a faculty member found
discrepancies between student performance in freshman English composition
classes and the SAT scores that led to their placement in those courses.
not uncommon, and during my freshman year in college I was placed in an honors
freshman English section made up of the students with the highest SAT verbal scores,
but is the SAT designed to be used to place students in college courses? I defer to those
with more expertise in psychometrics than I have, but I wonder if that is a misuse of the
SAT.
4)
We
know from the report how the data fraud occurred, but less about why. Williar told the investigators that he was
trying to “help” the college, but the report concludes that he committed the
fraud out of self-interest, as a way to increase both his compensation and his
status at the college. As in previous
cases of data misrepresentation, once you start inflating data, additional
misrepresentation is required to sustain the deception.
The
report found no evidence that Williar’s actions were influenced by pressure or
expectations from the Flagler administration or Board. I don’t know Marc Williar, and his actions
are indefensible, but the narrative of the rogue admissions officer doesn’t ring
true. I absolutely believe that no one
in a position of authority told him to change student records or manipulate
profile data, but I also suspect that his ethical lapses were encouraged by the
pressures, subtle or explicit, placed on admissions offices to achieve multiple
and challenging metric benchmarks. It is
no longer a successful year to bring in a full freshman class. You must also be more selective, raise SAT
scores, increase diversity, and lower the discount rate. Those are all worthwhile goals, but an
institutional climate that focuses first and foremost on those metrics is
unhealthy and partly to blame when data fraud occurs.
5)
As
I reported back in February, there have long been signs that Flagler was
engaged in creative accounting, not with regard to test scores, but with regard
to admit rate. Back in the early 1990s Flagler
was reporting to U.S. News an
acceptance rate lower than that for MIT, Duke, and Penn. I’m willing to entertain the notion that it
might have actually been more selective than those places, but the cynic in me
says that it was playing games in how it counted applications. If that’s the case, the conditions that led
to the manipulation of data have been present for a long time.
6)
There
is one other ethical issue mentioned in the investigative report that doesn’t
seem related to the data fraud, and I will discuss it in my next post.
How
many isolated cases constitute evidence of an epidemic, and how do we determine
whether a disease is contagious? The
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization
have had to deal with those questions this year with regard to Ebola. It may be
time for the college admissions profession to address those questions with
regard to data fraud and misrepresentation.
Hopefully the Flagler investigation will help prevent the next outbreak.