It was an average state college. Not sure the "less reputable" sounds right but I guess you can put it that way. And that's mostly what the article at hand is talking about anyway.
> you absolutely cannot be admitted without the right grades.
Is the Kentucky State going to call a school in Bangladesh to verify the transcript? Wealthy people who can afford to send kids to school in US with full tuition can probably find a way to "buy" a good transcript from a local school. Maybe you meant that SAT is a requirement, then yes, it thing might have changed and it is more challenging.
Fair enough, the article does mention some very mediocre colleges. I was thinking of decent colleges like Ohio State or Iowa State.
> Is the Kentucky State going to call a school in Bangladesh to verify the transcript? Wealthy people who can afford to send kids to school in US with full tuition can probably find a way to "buy" a good transcript from a local school. Maybe you meant that SAT is a requirement, then yes, it thing might have changed and it is more challenging.
Most decent colleges admit international students based on some standardized test like the SATs, IB, A-Levels or equivalent. High school transcripts are rarely acceptable due to variability in standards.
But you are right about Kentucky State. Its website states that it accepts "Official SAT/ACT OR TOEFL scores" from international students with their high school transcripts. This is utter garbage.
http://kysu.edu/administration-governance/student-engagement...
They often do. And admission committees learn from experience: if they admit students from a school and they don't perform well, they recruit less from that school the next year. Conversely, if they have students performing well, they will continue to admit more. There is a chain of trust.
A backwater program at a good university is going to be worse than a flagship program at a backwater university
If this is your experience, it sounds like you are baselining your opinions on less reputable U.S. universities (and there are quite a few of them around. The U.S. has over 3000 colleges.)
In most decent universities, you absolutely cannot be admitted without the right grades. In most competitive state colleges, international students actually require better (average) grades than locals for admission because they are placed in a separate, smaller pool of applicants. In-state applicants are often given priority.