College admissions scam 'very unlikely' to happen at Canadian schools

With little consideration given tostandardized testing orstudent athletic abilities, and without the same competitiveness to get intotop-tier schools,Canada is far less likely to be embroiled in a post-secondaryadmissions scandal like the one in the U.S., experts say.

"I think that the exact situation happening in Canada is probably not taking place," said Robert Astroff, president ofAstroff Consultants Inc.,a Toronto-based schooladmissions consulting company.

"I think we would be naive to think that there's none of this fraud going on, but I do think that the situation in Canada is qualitatively different than what we're seeing in the States.

"I would say in Canada there [is] lessopportunityto game the system."

Sparked outrage

The scandal that has sparked widespread outrage includesHollywood actressesFelicity Huffman andLori Loughlin, who are among the wealthy and well-connectedparentscharged in an allegedmultimillion-dollar scheme to help their childreninto elite universitiesby cheating the admissions process.

"I think, the way our system is set up, this kind of scale of fraud would be very very unlikely," said Richard Levin,executive director ofenrolment services anduniversityregistrar at the University of Toronto. "I'm certainlynot aware of anything like this."

Scams do happen, though.

Romesh Vadivel, president of the the Association of Registrars of Universities and Colleges of Canada, said officials haveseen some "pretty sophisticated and some not-so-sophisticated copies of academic transcriptswherethe individual ...is adept at Photoshop, to put together a transcriptthatlooks legit."

They have also seen misrepresentationsin terms of test scores andgrade inflation. Sometimeshigh schools misrepresentthegrades of students.

"But is it rampant? No."

He's never heard of anything happening in Canada similarto what's being alleged in the U.S., he said.

Part of thatalleged scam involved parents hiring people to write standardized college entrance exams, like the SAT and ACT, for their children, according to U.S. federal prosecutors.

Other parents allegedly claimed their children had learning disabilities, which would have given them more time to take the exam, one of the factors of admission forthe majority of U.S.post-secondary schools.

Not part of college admissions process

David Sidoo, a businessman and philanthropist in Vancouver, is alleged to havepaid $100,000 for someone to take his son's SAT in 2011.

But in Canada, those sorts of standardized tests are not part of the post-secondaryadmissions process.

"There's a much greater culture [in the U.S.] of standardized testing from an earlier stage," Astroff said.

Although high school graduates in Canada don't needto take standardized tests to apply to universities, professional graduateschools including law, medicine and business, do require those kinds of exams.

While cheating on those kinds of tests could happen, Astroff suggested that would be rare, since at that point in their post-secondarycareer, "a student has probably proven themselves academically already.

"There's additional hoops that you have to jump through at that level that are much more significant in terms of just the experiences that students need to get into professional school."

Some application processes to Canadian colleges may also involve essays, but it's not as important a part of the process as it can be in the U.S.

"So it's less susceptibleto that kind of fraud," Levinsaid.

Instead, Canadian universities and collegestend to rely fairly heavily on grades in their admission decisions.

"We're not looking at letters of reference. We're not looking at athleticqualities. Our focus is very much academic," Levin said.

At the University of British Columbia,every aspect of astudent applicant's submissions is scored and ranked, Andrew Arida, deputy registrar of the school, said in an email.

"We can clearly, empirically tell where every applicant falls in relation to our cut-offs and all the other applicants," he said."Our system has much clearer determinants of how applicants are ranked and admissibility is determined."

Some parents in the U.S. were also accused ofstagingphotos of their children playing sports so they could be admitted to the schools as athletes.

"Athleticsis very different in the U.S.," said Levin.It's a very significant part of U.S.colleges and universities.

"Here, we certainly do try to recruit good athletesbut they still have to meet our admission requirements."

Ivy league school competition

A major difference between American and Canadian schoolsis that the U.S. is home to a handful of prestigious Ivy League universities, whichsparks fierce competition for admission.

"Thecompetitive landscape is also completely different,"Astroff said."So the difference between top-tier and lower-tier schools in the United States is quite pronounced."

"I would say that with most Canadian schools there's less to differentiate them. So there will be less competition."

Canadatends to have larger, more accessible public schools,Levin said.

"So we don't have any universitiesthat are making offers to only four to fiveper cent of their applications."