The Headline from Toronto, courtesy of the Ubyssey: York university student caught with fake degree.

The subtitle reads Law student one of hundreds in Canada with fraudulent post-secondary credentials, to which my honest-to-god first reaction was Whaaa-at?? Canadians? Cheating, at anything? This is unheard of.

But the article quickly makes things clear: “Third-year student Quami Frederick is under review for academic dishonesty after she submitted a degree she alleg­edly never earned for admis­sion to Toronto’s York University Osgoode Law School.

“The Toronto Star reported on December 13 that Frederick spent $1,109 on a St. George’s University BA in business ad­ministration from a US-based diploma mill in 2004.” So, Quami Frederick is being kicked out of law school, and the rest of her life will be utterly altered by this stain on her record—a big, ugly stain brought on by the smaller stain of a fake degree.

But then there’s the matter that Quami Frederick was a third-year law student—much nearer the end of law school than its beginning. Law school anywhere is hard, but York’s Osgoode School is by all accounts respected and good and it’s been around for more than a century and … and it’s hard. Like, hard, right? Law school is very hard. Based merely on how far Frederick came in the program, however, she was going to make it—graduate and step out into the wide world of law.

Then she got caught.

Justice doesn’t like misunderstandings.

This is the lesson. In fact, it’s the only lesson, in the eyes of the knuckle-rapping traditionalists who go on and on about “obeying the rules” and “not lying” to “the people who decide your future.” And, really, it’s as simple as it sounds: fake degrees are wrong, and the people who get them get caught.

Even from a more sympathetic point of view—one that takes into account Frederick’s undeniable smarts, and is willing to listen to her story, and to hear about whatever terrible turns of luck led her down the path of fake degree-getting—the story is still ugly, but now it’s sad, too.

To sum up: There are scores of well-respected online universities out there, offering high-quality degree programs. Go to one of those. Don’t order a piece of paper from some degree mill, because

A) It’s a lie, and lies are bad
B) A fake degree is also something you have to pay handsomely for, meaning
C) You’re paying some fake school to help you in this grand fabrication, yet
D) Even if the lie gets you through school, later, when you achieve any semblance of the success you dream about, some coworker at some point will ask where you went to school, and you’ll say “Oh I went to a little college called St. George’s way way far away in Grenada”
E) And they’ll say “OMG! I went there too!!! Let’s sign you up for the St. George’s Facebook group right now, and then let’s go to coffee and trade stories about school and become friends forever”
F) At which point you will be, pretty much, screwed. As my Sunday school teacher used to say, one small lie begets bigger ones…