I don’t know what this person was thinking. Story here.

‘Fake student’ attended NZ uni for 2 years

THE dean of Auckland University’s medical school says he’s extremely concerned a person managed to pretend to be a medical student for two years.

The student failed to gain entry into the medical school in 2010 but had since allegedly attended classes and was able to deceive classmates and teachers by not submitting assessments or sitting tests.

He was detected when an assignment was submitted which didn’t match any name on the class list, Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences dean Professor John Fraser said.

Nigerian doctors need to study too.

I’ve often wondered how far a person could take this sort of thing, it was always fairly clear to me when I was at uni (which was recently) that a person could easily sit in on lectures, and even quite plausibly get themself assigned to seminar/lab groups at least for a little while, feigning administrative issues to explain their absence from official lists.

But I always thought it’d take some real cunning and ambition (most of the cunning students I’ve met extended their cunning only to things like getting deadline extensions, ‘free’ resits, and the like.) to last a semester, managing two years is pretty remarkable.

Given that the medical school dream has evidently hit a real snag, in the being found out thing, I wonder if the student would consider a career in espionage or some related field, he clearly has some talent in lying his way into places!

Well, it’s certainly better than the opposite - claiming or forging a degree when you haven’t done the coursework…