Scholarship News

Cambridge, MA, United States (AHN) – The Delaware man who gained international attention for cheating his way into one of the world’s best schools and nearly graduating has been sentenced to 10 years of probation.

Former Harvard University student Adam Wheeler admitted on Thursday to larceny, identity fraud, falsifying an endorsement, and pretending to hold a degree. As his sentence for the 20 offenses, he will have to continue with counseling and spend a decade of his life reporting to a probation officer.

Wheeler is also required to pay restitution of more than $45,800 for grants he received while a student. He is banned from having direct or indirect contact with the university and other schools he used to gain admission into Harvard.

He was given two and a half years in prison for identity theft but he was ordered to serve only 30 days of the sentence, a balance that the judge suspended for 10 years.

Wheeler, 24, was a senior at Harvard when he applied for Rhodes and Fulbright scholarships last September. His applications caught the attention of a professor, who found that Wheeler had plagiarized nearly an entire piece written by a colleague.

The university soon discovered that Wheeler had submitted a false Harvard transcript showing perfect grades over three years in his Rhodes and Fulbright applications. A more extensive review of his academic file revealed that he had similarly submitted false transcripts from MIT and Philips Academy in Andover when he applied for transfer to Harvard.

Wheeler had also submitted in his Harvard application several letters of recommendation from MIT and Philips Andover, and documents showing he had received a perfect SAT score of 1600.

The recommendations contained forged signatures of professors at Bowdoin College in Maine, where Wheeler had been suspended because of plagiarism.

During his time at Harvard, Wheeler won two prestigious writing prizes with submissions that were also plagiarized.

According to university records, Wheeler was awarded the Winthrop Sargent prize for a work entitled, “Mapping An Ideological Demesne: Utopia and The Tempest.” and the Hoopes prize for, “The Mapping of an Ideological Demesne: Space, Place, and Text From More to Marvell.”

The two awards and a research grant gave Wheeler a total of $14,000. He also received financial aid from the university amounting to more than $31,000.

Wheeler was expelled from Harvard in October but he continued to lie about his academic record.

He applied for an internship at McLean Hospital, the largest psychiatric facility at Harvard, and despite being rejected, attempted to transfer to Brown University, Stanford University and Yale University by claiming he was an intern at McLean.

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