It won’t come as a surprise to many students that lying on a college application is a bad idea. But the line between truth and lies can become progressively blurrier when students are trying to give themselves every reasonable admissions advantage.

Should you check a particular ethnicity box when you acknowledge it’s true for only a tiny percentage of your DNA?

Does taking AP Spanish qualify you to answer “Yes” to whether or not you’re fluent in a second language?

Should you list yourself as founder and president of a club that only met once?

Where is the line? When does the spirit of the application law supersede the letter?

There are no hard and fast rules here, but I’d offer these two guidelines:

1. If an admissions officer called your counselor to verify this information, would you be confident or nervous about what your counselor would say?

2. If the interviewer for your dream school asked you to tell her more about this, would you be happy to dive into the details, or would you feel like you’d been caught in a fib?

Your answer to those questions should give you a good sense of whether or not you’re heading toward application impropriety.

And while “Could a college really find out I stretched the truth?” is the wrong question to ask, here’s my answer.