Tips and advice I wish I had known when filing my application back in October:

Lie to them.

1. Career objectives: they don't look for the same profiles for LLMs as they do for JD. So lie to them. Tell them you want to go into teaching even if you don't. They might not openly say it like Yale does but they're mostly interested in future law professors.
For Harvard, the only purpose of LLM is preselecting SJD candidates. It allows them to spend one year finding out whether you're one of best theorist and legal thinker in the world and thus worthy for SJD.
Even if you want to work in biglaw, don't tell them so.

2. Extracurriculum activities: lie to them. If you're international, there's no way they can find out whether you're making stuff up, nor do they have the time to find out, there's just way too many applications.
Just say you've spent 3 months saving orphans in Africa, and that you've created an association to help women victim of domestic violence. If you're afraid they might look it up, just ask a friend with webdesign skills to create a website, with pictures of you and family members with fake tags such as "Secretary", "President", etc. and of course not in English.

3. Academic achievements/grades: don't ever lie to them/fake these. You'll have to produce actual proof sooner or later. If you don't have the grades to be considered in the first place, these tips won't help you. The only thing it does is tip the scale in your favor vs similar candidates.

And if you're wondering what I'm basing my "advice" on: a friend of mine got admitted fresh out of college. She has almost no work experience, same grades as I. But she said she wanted to become a law professor (even though she doesn't, at least not before 20 years+ working in big firms) and I was the friend with webdesign skills who created the fake association for her.

I told her I felt it was a bad idea but agreed to help her with the website nevertheless. I can still picture myself saying to her "you're crazy, they'll find out, you'll see, these guys are smart, they'll smell the trick from miles away, there's no way I'm going to fake or exaggerate any fact, my honesty will be rewarded in the end".
Oh what a fool I was. Yes I'm posting this out of rage, because I received the rejection letter and she was admitted.

Perhaps this is an anomaly, something that shouldn't happen but sometimes 1 out of 150 gets through. But what if it's not. Do you know of people around you who also did the same: lied about wanting to become a law professor and faked ECs? I mean if it's actually happening often, perhaps it's time to voice it out and force admission committees to be more cautious and require more proof, rather than just trusting our honesty?

No reason to doubt you, but I do wish this isn't true anyways. I have strong credentials, high grades, 18 working experience abroad, publications and whatsoever other stuff that should have allowed me to gain admission into Harvard. However, I got my rejection letter after 3 days of painful waiting since the first post upon HLS admissions on this blog was posted. All that said, I haven't realize yet how do they pick their own admitted students among thousand of overqualified applicants...

Let's hope for you and your "friend" that nobody from Harvard (or who knows anyone in the admission department) reads this post as it must be quite easy to identify your friend (nationality, sex, contents of personal statement/CV) and it is just as easy to check whether a charity is an actual existing organisation.

This is either a joke or a cunning plan by llm selectors in a top college to smoke out cheaters.

Harvy,

That's a fact of life : some people get by by lying and cheating. Until the day they get caught. If you want to become the next Arthur Anderson or Bernard Madof, good for you. I don't. But I know that you actually don't either and you're just posting this out of rage and disgust.

What I would like to write here (mainly for future viewers considering to apply to HLS) is that I don't agree with the necessity of writing that you want to pursue an academic career. I wrote in my application that I wanted to work for an international business law firm. (I did say I was also interested in research and teaching, which is true). I got admitted. And it's not only me, there are many people who work for a few years in biglaw and then go to Harvard... I don't think the admissions commitee would really believe them if they all said their dream was to be a professor!

And when you think about it, it's logical: Harvard doesn't want its LLM students to all become professors. One of the purposes of going there is to meet bright people with different destinies, and to later be in touch with politicians, lawyers, professors, judges, etc. in each continent.

So you did the right thing by not lying to them about your career objectives. As for the false website, well maybe you would have taken the edge over your friend by not helping her and doing the website for yourself. Or maybe not... You will never know, but what you know is that you were honest and don't have to worry about what will happen if someone finds out. And what we all know on this board is that admission decisions can be arbitrary, or at least hard to understand from the outside (how many times have I read "I've been admitted by X and rejected by Y, although X is clearly better ranked than Y!"). There are so many applicants and so few spots that you never know, even with a great CV, AND EVEN with a presidency of a fake humanitarian association.

About the new core question (after you edited your post), i.e. are there a lot of people who lie in their applications, well not among the ones I know, but I don't have a large sample to talk about ;-)

I am certain that you will have an amazing time in another great (and prestigious) school.

Good luck for the future,
Cecilia

Let's hope for you and your "friend" that nobody from Harvard (or who knows anyone in the admission department) reads this post as it must be quite easy to identify your friend (nationality, sex, contents of personal statement/CV) and it is just as easy to check whether a charity is an actual existing organisation.

Why have you edited out the nationality then?

Cecilia: indeed not only future law professors are admitted. But there are several times less future professor applicants than business lawyers, yet in the actual admitted class, future law professors are "over-represented". Therefore statistically, chances are higher. Congratulations on your acceptance, once at Cambridge, do a quick polling of your fellow LLM class: ask them whether they said they were interested in teaching or in law firms, you'll get a rather high percentage of law professors compared with, for example, LLM-Guide users.

Why have you edited out the nationality then?

Though I can imagine the frustrations of an applicant who really wants to go to a particular university but feels that he/she has not done "enough" to secure a place there, ethically, I can't imagine anyone will be silly enough to even consider going down this route. Though there's nothing to stop you from lying your way into any university (short of claiming you won the Nobel Prize, since I think generally, most universities don't have the resources to verify loads of details about an individual application), whether HLS or otherwise, I think it's a really, really stupid move that, if I may say so, says a lot about your friend's own likely eventual station in life. People talk - you're going to find yourself in a class where you have to keep up pretenses about your charity work; as a result, you then have to keep up the pretension in life until someone calls your bluff, which results in a smeer of your reputation so considerable no academic qualification can ever allow you to sand-paper it over. By cheating therefore, you achieve short-term gain at the expense of long-term pain, which makes it quite pointless to cheat since not many people see the LLM as the final destination in their career and instead, see it as a launching pad to bigger and better things.

Even if you don't get caught, the knowledge that you have to watch your back your entire life, particularly if you are successful, should be enough to deter anyone from cheating. So even if she doesn't get caught out, your friend now has to carry the charity-involvement lie all the way to the grave and will have to answer more than one question on it during the course of her life where she needs to be aware of what her previous answers were and how to make sure they are all consistent. These things have a habit of coming back to haunt.

Harvy is fucking over his friend :)

You're probably right Santa, which if you think about it, proves the central thesis of this entire thread: cheat, and you have to worry about getting caught out for the rest of your life. That in itself should prove a worthy deterrent.

Yes Santa I've lost a friend out of this.

Yasmin you do make a strong case why people shouldn't cheat. However, I believe you're overestimating the deterrent factor of "having to live with it all your life".

Only the admission committee knows what you wrote in your application, and possibly certain faculty members but only if they request it. The other students won't know about it. And for every subsequent position, no one will bother reading her EC if there's the "h-bomb" on her resume, so she won't ever have to reiterate the lie again.

The fundamental problem remains: the LLM application process isn't secure enough. All you need to do is send letters. Not to mention how 4.0 GPA are easy to get in certain colleges whereas other countries/colleges never award grades above 3.5 but I won't get into this debate.

Getting into "Harvard" isn't just about prestige, in this economy it has dire consequences: it's the difference between securing a job and risking being unemployed with a loan to repay. The temptation is high, and increasing every year.

An institution as honorable and as wealthy as Harvard certainly has the obligation and the means to improve their admission process?

For example, for maybe 300-500 applicants which have passed a first round, they could ask alumni living in the same country to investigate, interview them and contact their professors and employers?

Dear Harvy, Have you think that if you get in laying and cheating and the law school finds out that you are cheating they will expel you and you will be blacklisted in every university in US and you will not been able to take the bar?

However, I must recognize that some people that I know that have been admitted at HLS have exaggerated their credentials.

I agree that, in an ideal world, all law schools should verify the credentials of their students. But it's difficult, if not unrealistic to do so, at least to the level of even verifying every single minuate of their CV.

I really do think that it's not worth it to cheat though. As was mentioned before, the admissions process is opaque and if the aim is to guarantee admission via cheating, one would have to "pad" the resume with loads of lies (since one small lie would in all likelihood be unable to do the trick). As you yourself mentioned, this can sometimes require perpetuating the lie in the form of creating purportedly corroborating sources (e.g. the Internet example you mentioned), which was what I was referring to when I was saying that the lie can only go on for so long. The more "evidence" you so fashion, the more traps you create for yourself. Quite apart from ethics (which points to the same conclusion), I'd much rather have a clean conscience and go to my second-choice school knowing I will never have to ever account for a lie in my CV, or on the Internet, than to conjure up numerous lies and thereafter pray that I won't be caught for the rest of my life.

That said, I take your point on schools being more vigilant about such fibbing, though I do wonder how it could ever be feasible to expect admission offices to scrutinize the CVs to the extent that you envision - even if alumni are involved, as you envisioned, short of interrogating the candidate, how can they ever really know what you've done and not done? After all, not all community projects have a website or an official office that one can refer enquiries to.

Do I smell envy?

Too bad you are an accomplice to the fraud, otherwise you could tell the admissions.
Oh! Wait. You are not concerned about the fairness of admissions! You just wish you had lied too...

I would prefer even to fail with honor than to win by cheating

Sophocles quotes

"It is the nature of ambition to make men liars and cheats, to hide the truth in their breasts, and show, like jugglers, another thing in their mouths."

Sallust

crimlawyer: believe what you want. All I know is I'm sad I didn't get in. And that disappointment may be clouding my judgment. I might sound envious right now. But I didn't lie then, and in a year once I'll graduate and find a good job, any ounce of envy will have totally disappeared. It's just that denunciation (except for certain very specific crimes) is against my moral principles.

REM: you're basing your opinion on the assumption that cheaters will get caught eventually. Yet, right now most law schools aren't even trying to identify fraud.

Even worse, admission committees seem to have accepted the fact that "everyone exaggerates more or less", and since admission is relative to other candidates rather than overall achievements (ie. 150 LSAT is enough to get into Yale if that's the highest score that year), then "no one exaggerates".

What they do is trust in the experience and cunning of their admission staff in order to identify "over-exaggeration", and that's about it.

Interviews would go a long way in deterring EC lies. Not only because 5 minutes of face to face discussion can do wonders in exposing certain claims, but most of all because a lot of candidates will think twice before lying in a resume when they know they'll have to answer about it during an interview.

12thMonkey, probably a fair observation of human nature, but I think the phrase you quoted (from Sallus) fails to take into account the additional consideration of the utilitarian nature of the decision not to lie in these circumstances - i.e. the fact that one loses more than one gains in the long run (by virtue of the possibility of getting caught and losing everything in the process). That, more than anything else, I think should serve as the main impetus to rendering Sallus' quote somewhat less relevant in this context (even if one does not subscribe to the existence of an ethical conundrum).

HLS doesn't only want future academics. Looking at the class profile of 2007/08 for the HLS LLM (you can find it online) they have diverse legal interests and career objectives. I am sure the same diversity will be reflected in the 2009/10 class. Similarly the age range of previous LLMs is varied and just because your friend is straight out of uni that isn't necessarily a disadvantage.

I don't think anyone can condone or justify lying to get into law school. This merely shows what kind of lawyer (or otherwise) your friend will become. You have no reason to feel jealous, at least you won't have a pretense to maintain during your LLM - although perhaps with the benefit of hindsight you will think twice before assisting in a lie (not to sound condescending).