By Dawn Renta, DPA, Director of Graduate Academic Operations and Student Progress, The Graduate School, West Chester University, Live from #AACRAO2026
At the 111th AACRAO Annual Meeting, Doretta Kidd, Associate Director of Admissions at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, shared a problem that is becoming far too common in higher education: an influx of fake transcripts.
In her session “Finding and Responding to Fraudulent Transcripts,” Kidd shared how she and her staff discovered that the same high school transcript was being submitted for several admission applicants, with only the student’s name or the school’s name changed. The classes, grades, and GPA were all identical. With schools processing thousands of transcripts per admission cycle, finding these patterns can be difficult.
Once the issue was discovered, Kidd started running a series of queries to compare data of admission applicants and also discovered that several applicants had the same phone number, and the applicants were logging into the school’s system from a variety of geographically distant locations that did not make sense based on the amount of time between log-ins.
Realizing that her department was being inundated with fake admission applications and fraudulent transcripts, Kidd created a list of “high alert” schools and colleges, requiring manual review of documents to ensure their legitimacy. In an office that already deals with high volume and tight deadlines, adding this step created a burden.
Kidd began leveraging an identity verification functionality in the school’s customer relationship management platform that automatically reviews all applications and flags any that are suspicious. If an application is flagged in the CRM, the applicant is then required to complete an in-person verification process at UMKC. Applicants who do not follow through are withdrawn. This has cut down on the frequency of fraudulent transcripts and gives Kidd and her staff reassurance that the applicants are legitimate.
After the main presentation, multiple session attendees shared instances of finding fraudulent documents at their own institutions and had to find solutions to address the issue. Some had escalated this issue to university counsel and/or state authorities, only to find out that this is not a widely known issue. Clearly, more action needs to be taken.
Five takeaways from this session are clear:
Schools should include identity verification early in the application process.
While quick admission decisions are desirable, time should still be taken to make sure the submitted documents are legitimate.
If a school sees a sudden spike in applications, it might be too good to be true.
Reports should be developed and utilized to identify patterns in applicant data, such as identical transcripts or contact information.
More awareness needs to be brought to this issue. Without vigilance, fraudulent transcripts will become more pervasive and harder to stop before it is too late.
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