Viebranz’s company mainly serves graduate schools, and he says the vetting process routinely turns up discrepancies, including changing employment dates to cover gaps and inflating job titles.

Undergraduate applications haven’t come under the same level of scrutiny, although “we’re hearing a lot of discussion about how do we verify student applications and how do we ensure that what they’re giving us is correct,” Viebranz says.

In the UC’s 10-campus system, officials use a spot-check program that randomly selects about 10 percent of freshman applications — about 7,000 last year.

Selected students are asked to back up one claim — for instance, sending in a copy of a yearbook photo showing they really were class president. Officials also check transcripts sent in by high schools to see if the claimed and actual GPAs match.

Few applicants flunk the honesty test, says Susan Wilbur, UC’s director of undergraduate admissions. Last year, two or three students had their applications canceled as a result of ignoring the request or being unable to provide verification, and another handful were weeded out in the transcript check, she says.

“It just hasn’t been our experience that large numbers of students are falsifying their applications,” Wilbur says.

There’s no one system that undergraduate schools are using for verification, although a number use high-school-submitted transcripts as a benchmark, said David Hawkins, public policy director for the National Association for College Admission Counseling.

In the Contra Costa case, a vetting program wouldn’t have helped ferret out cheaters.

Even now, officials at four-year universities where the suspected students transferred say they won’t be able to take any steps until Contra Costa district officials send out corrected transcripts.

No data are available on the amount of cheating going on. Experienced admissions officers say the numbers may be higher with more people applying, but the percentage of faked applications probably hasn’t changed much, Hawkins said.