At universities, cheating can be a problem — even before students are admitted to Iowa State, university officials said.Patricia Parker, assistant director of admissions, said the office probably catches between five and 10 applications for foreign student admissions a year that are either fraudulent or suspected to be fraudulent.University graduate school admission offices are being told by directors of two standard tests for international students to carefully check test scores of foreign students, especially from China, according to the Associated Press. Linxiao Yu, graduate student in materials science and engineering from Guangzhou, China, said he has heard about students getting the questions before taking the Graduate Record Examination test so they can get high scores. “They go through some illegal approach to get that [high score],” he said.He said his university in China gives transcripts with a special design developed with a mark for security. However, he said fraudulent records may be possible at other universities.”I think maybe at some other universities, they do not take this problem so serious,” he said. Parker said students sometimes make photocopies of official documents and use white tape or erase items and write over them before making another copy. She said these students might get a stamp or seal to put on the record that looks official. Other times, she said, the entire academic record is fake.”In some foreign countries, they don’t have record-issuing sorts of processes like we do,” she said.Parker said the office at Iowa State has trained evaluators to catch fraudulent records and test scores. She said the evaluators compare the chronology on the academic record with the student’s application, and they check birth dates and signatures on test scores.The evaluators learn what the credentials look like, and they look for things such as smudged lettering, different fonts and letters or numbers slightly higher or lower on the page than they should be, she said.”They are looking for things that are irregular,” she said. “There’s a lot of little techniques that they use to spot these things.”Parker said fraudulent academic records don’t just come from China.”This is not something that is a China thing,” she said. “It’s something that’s happening all over the world.”She said it is also not just graduate admissions but undergraduate as well, and all applications need to be checked carefully. Yu said he believes it is better for universities to look at other things besides Graduate Record Examination test scores, such as the research papers the student has written. He said the majority of international students really do have the test scores and the credentials to get into Iowa State. “[The cheating] will have a negative effect to all the other Chinese students,” he said. “I believe that 99 percent of Chinese students here … deserve the admission here.”