It is not a foolproof process.

James Arthur Hogue, a serial impostor, got into Princeton University in 1988 by posing as a self-educated ranch hand. He ran on the track team and was admitted to an exclusive eating club before being unmasked.

Short of outright fraud, popular culture has glorified the hardship story in college admissions, persuading many students to make it an essential part of their application.

A well-publicized 2010 memoir by Liz Murray, for example, was subtitled, “My Journey From Homeless to Harvard.” The online Common Application, used by more than 800 colleges and universities, taps into that vein. It encourages students to write about overcoming obstacles and to share “a background, identity, interest or talent that is so meaningful” that their application would be incomplete without it.

The Common Application asks students to certify that they are telling the truth, but does not try to independently confirm that they are. It is up to colleges to take that extra step, said Daniel Obregon, a spokesman for the Common Application.

Some universities require students to sign a sworn statement that they are telling the truth, under pain of prosecution. But officials admit they are not seeking to be law enforcement.

Mainly, officials and counselors said, they look for inconsistencies. Do standardized test scores and grades match? Do certain words and phrases in an essay jump out as being in the vocabulary of an adult rather than a teenager? Are a student’s extracurricular activities too good to be true?

And they depend on high school counselors to give them honest appraisals of students who are applying. “If each component is not all pulling in the same direction, it becomes a kind of red flag,” said Katharine Harrington, vice president of admissions and planning at the University of Southern California.