Okay all you eager undergrads who read our site faithfully, here is the best tip we could ever give you regarding your law school applications.
Do not, under any circumstances, try to use a fake degree to apply to law school. Chances are it will catch up with you eventually.
Quami Frederick made it all the way to her third year in Osgoode Hall before the Toronto Star found her out. She was even scheduled to article at Wilboer Dellelce next year, the firm that has no billable hours, their own building, and a gym inside the office.
She had applied to Osgoode with a B.Sc. in Business Administration from St. George’s University in Grenada. The university exists, her degree does not.
She was one of the 290 students accepted from the 2,500 that applied that year. But when your degree is fake, grade inflation probably isn’t a major issue.
Fredrick is one of many people The Star uncovered as using a degree from a diploma mill, where a fake degree is forged from a real university, or an entirely fake university is created. (No Steyn, that’s not an option for you either)
Chances are Fredrick won’t be able to finish her law degree this year given her admission was premised on a false academic background. She also probably fails to meet the values expressed on her firm’s website,
Our firm’s greatest strengths are its people and the environment of care and mutual respect that they have created for one another. It goes without saying that to be a success in the Bay Street legal world, you must possess intelligence, integrity, dedication, some common sense and you must work very hard.
The upside is that Wildeboer Dellelce probably has an opening right now if you’re your third year and looking for a place to article in Toronto.
Try contacting Kevin Fritz at 416 361 2933 or James Brown at 416 361 2934.
i am seaking a position with you’re law farm. I specalize in leagal matters dealing with yoots. I only work 9 to 5 and i need the next tow weaks off so I can go to Jamaca on vacatoin. Please call me when i get back but dont call me when the hockey game is on tv
Your’es truly,
skinny Dipper… :-)
PS i kneed a lot of money so i can pay off my credit card that i am using for the jamaca trip
Sad part is that if she could get to third year at Osgoode with no degree, she probably could’ve earned a BSc the hard way.
It’s too bad she took a spot that should have gone to a deserving applicant. Even if she was allowed to graduate there’s no way she could meet the moral fitness test imposed by every law society in Canada. Maybe she can go back and practise in Grenada but I expect they’re on to her too.
This reminds me of a Simpsons episode when Apu bought his citizenship papers and other fake ID from the “mafia” brothers in a back alley.
Is any of you, who are leaving the valuable comments here, a single mom ???
Nova– what does it matter if you are a single mom or not?
Are you a law student who legitimately got accepted to law school? or worse, are you a person who was waitlisted at osgoode for the 2006-07 year?
Goes to show that the whole system is a sham. You could dress up anybody in a nice suit, with a good “transcript” and they could pass quite easily as a law student. Are law schools really admitting the best and the brightest? Or are they admitting people who know how to work their way past a bureaucracy?
Had this “single mom” got past the system undetected, and graduated, how many people would she have over-billed as a lawyer? Pity it took a journalist to blow her cover, and that no one in the law-school community ever noticed that she wasn’t up to snuff: but then again maybe she fit right in. Maybe there is very little difference between an undergrad with a high grade-point average, and your average Joe living in Rexdale.
Bronson–
I think some subsequent revelations shows the system (well at least the law school system) working. It turns out that Ms. Frederick was not doing well in law school; she was getting multiple Cs (which are bad marks in law school) and got the job because she forged her law school transcript for the firm.
I would actually agree with Bronson that the system is not working.
Marks, both in undergrad and in law school, have poor correlation with intelligence, knowledge of the law, or prediction of success in the legal field. With the exception of people on the Dean’s List like Jacob, they also have little effect on job prospects, outside of initial hires right out of school.
Similarly, the LSAT is usually only a predictor of exam writing ability, such as the bar admissions course. There have been some parallels shown between the LSAT and IQ tests, but again this is more likely indicative of standardized testing than any actual measure of intelligence (the definition of which is also debated). Even with forged high marks, Fredrick would still have to perform well on the LSAT. There is absolutely no way to cheat this, and they even take thumbprints to ensure identity (LSAC probably should verify her thumbprint at this point, just in case).
No, the system doesn’t work because it allows people to lie, and get away with it. Fredrick is hardly the only person to fake her marks to apply to law schools. Several individuals were caught in recent years at UofT. And there are countless more I am sure that are never detected at all. I am curious how The Star initially discovered this incident so that similar safeguards can be implemented more uniformly.
There is another side to this story here that is glossed over, which is what would drive an individual to go this far. Law schools are becoming increasingly difficult to get into in Canada, and usually only the best performers in any undergraduate program are admitted. Having served on university admissions committees in other programs, I know that schools do this as a simple means to filter through the thousands of applications that they have, and not because it guarantees a better practitioner in any way.
As a result, Osgoode Hall has modified its admissions criteria this year to have a sizable cohort of their incoming class using criteria beyond GPA/LSAT, with more weight afforded to the personal statement. Other law schools, as is Canadian tradition, will likely follow suit over time.
Private practice, which is the most competitive area of law job applications, also uses grades as a screening tool. But this area of law is also the most financially driven. And as is often stated, law firms are the most poorly organized and managed businesses in our society. The more successful firms of the future will seek out specific personality types to meet their internal needs better.
But one thing we can all agree is that, regardless of the area of practice, the last thing any employer should want is someone who cheats on their applications. There are some studies indicating people that cheat on tests are more likely to cheat on their taxes, lie to friends, defraud clients, and even cheat on their spouse. It’s usually a habit that is better to avoid developing in life, and as Fredrick demonstrated, once someone starts there is a higher likelihood they will continue. The unfortunate thing is that there are some unscrupulous firms for which such ethos would actually be an asset.
okay. If the necessity to go to law school is a must… then why dont you just read the law and study the law like Abraham Lincoln. If you the intellectual ability to comprehend, to analyze, and to reason; then you are a competent individual to succeed in the field of law. With a little bit of research, you could become the lawyer you always wanted to be.
Should Law School be the only source to learn the law?
NO.
Who told you that is the only WAY to learn the law?
Society has been the cause and will always be the cause for you not to succeed.
All schools, including Law Schools; are there to make money just as any other business outhere.
There is no rule or law that says you must go to law school because this is the only way ( Again, let say it again) THE ONLY WAY TO LEARN THE LAW? Come, people! think. Use your intelligence and your common sense. Look at for example at Abraham Lincoln. Did he go to Law School? I don’t think so. Before applying to any Law School in the United States. First find out what are the requirements to practice law in that state that you intend to practice.
Before you start blowing your money. Contact your local BAR ASSOCIATION. (Emphasis added)
Let me brake it down.
1. Contact your local Bar Association what requirements do they want you to have before being admitted.
2. Ask if you can be admitted to take the Bar exam without JD or any other degree. ( JD stands for Juris Degree)
3. Now, if you have a Bachelors degree then, ask if you can take the Bar exam.
To make this short, contact your local Bar association. DO THIS FIRST before you start spending tremendous amounts of money.
These Bars Associations control their local Law Schools in your area. So before start applying and your money; contact them first and see what is the requirement to take the bar.
Also, don’t just look in your state. Look at other states bars associations as to what they require you to take the Bar Exam.
That’s it. Good luck.
While I certainly don’t condone what this woman did in order to get into law school, I can understand, to a certain degree, where she’s coming from. For the past two years, I’ve been haunted by a less-than-stellar (okay, less-than-mediocre) undergraduate record. I’ve applied and been refused to pretty much every medical school in the country twice and have been upgrading my record along with completing a new degree. For two years I have worked extremely hard and finished top of my class while maintaining a very heavy course load of predominantly maths and physics courses. I still haven’t gotten in anywhere in Canada.
If you look at all the medical schools and their requirements, there are only two that with which I actually stand a chance – the rest have branded me with a scarlet letter that I simply cannot shake. In times when doctors are so hard to come by, you’d think that they might relax the criteria a bit… nope.
I’ve been accepted to schools in Australia, Ireland, Scotland and France but for some reason, I’m not good enough to practice, or even study, medicine in my own country – that is truly shameful. What I cannot understand is the rationale behind these admissions criteria. They don’t make any sense. The whole system is backwards. Ask any med student – once you gain acceptance to a program, it’s downhill. This is ridiculous. A person should be evaluated based on their performance in medical school. not before it. It’s a system that is widely used in European countries. In France, everyone can enter into the first year of medical school. If you make it into the second year, you’ve earned the right to stay there.
I did a very hard degree my first time around and yet there are people gaining acceptance into medical school based on Arts degrees that have absolutely nothing to do with medicine. We’ve adopted this ridiculous system where medical schools would rather students have a wide and varied breadth of knowledge! This is insane… I would rather have a doctor treating me who has been devoted to the study of one thing for a long period of time that one who did an undergrad in basket weaving and middle eastern foreign policy. Why are we making our future doctors such pussies?
I sympathize with this girl because the thought of doing what she did has crossed my mind before. In the end, however, the pleasure that I will get once I finally get into medical school is worth the work I have to put in to fix my grades. Even if I didn’t get caught, in the end, I’d only be selling myself short, another quality you don’t want in a doctor… or a lawyer for that matter.