UC Berkeley Checking Up on MBA Students

Of 100 students who have qualified thus far for admission to the fall class at the Haas School of Business, five were rejected in February after they were discovered to have made false claims about their work histories, said Jett Pihakis, director of domestic admissions for the school's full-time MBA program.

The most egregious case involved a student who had fabricated a record of promotions at his job, and included a letter of recommendation purportedly written by a supervisor but actually written by an assistant. All five had strong enough backgrounds that they would have been admitted if they had told the truth, Pihakis said.

"It's such a shame," he said. "But ethics is very important in any field, and in business right now you want to make sure that the people you're admitting are who and what they say they are."

Haas, a high-ranking business school, is one of a growing number of educational institutions to begin verifying whether their applicants are telling the truth.

Business school officials say they have reason to be particularly concerned about ethics, given the collapse of Enron and other high-profile corporate scandals of the last year.

Haas administrators say they followed the example of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, which recently began requiring applicants to pay for an outside firm to audit the truthfulness of their applications. Many other business schools, including UCLA's, run background checks on a random sample of admitted students, officials said.

But business schools are not alone in such concerns.

This year, the University of California began to spot-check undergraduate applications, looking for students lying or stretching the truth in their claims of honors, extracurricular activities, employment, or even adversity, officials said.

The decision was prompted in part by the growing competition for spots at UC's most elite campuses, but also by a shift in its admissions policy last year that allows all freshman applicants to be evaluated on personal, as well as academic achievements.