A Test He Couldn’t Pass: College Admissions Expert Loses Domain

Get into Harvard? Not this way. That’s the message of a World Intellectual Property Organization dispute panel after ruling the website harvard-review.com confusingly uses the name of a famous university in promoting skills training for college admissions tests, without authorisation.

Harvard-review.com is a private website unaffiliated with the famous US university, but does not specify the lack of affiliation anywhere on the website. The testing service claims on its website to have several offices around New York state. Harvard University is in Massachusetts.

The service charges a fee and claims to offer a foolproof method for high scores on tests, with a “guarantee” to get accepted at several colleges, including Harvard. It says it uses a method developed by “Dr. M. Fikar”, who it asserts has gotten a perfect score on the Standardized Admissions Test (SAT) over 100 times, and well as on numerous other admissions tests.

The website owner did not respond to the dispute panel, and it was decided the domain name was registered in bad faith and ordered to be given to the legitimate owner of the Harvard name.

The decision, available here, was dated 3 August, but as of 22 August the website was still up and operating.