Should I be truthful about graduate school rejections? Suppose a student applies to a few good graduate programmes, but for some reasons, gains an admit in one great school and rejects in a couple of equally good ones. How necessary is it for the student to be truthful about his rejects? There are a couple of circumstances that arise here:


The student is invited to an interview at a school, where he is asked about his applications and decisions. Is it okay to lie that the results are pending? Or that he has been offered admits at a couple of places? It is likely that the student will face a dilemma if he feels the other decisions may affect this one as well.
Is it vital to be truthful at the graduate school you have joined? Is there any mutual communication between administrative sections of all top colleges, which may leave bluffing in bad taste?
As someone involved in graduate admissions decisions, I can say unequivocally that knowing a student has been denied admission at another program does not negatively influence my admissions decisions.  I have all of the application materials from the student, and (assuming the applicant is strong) the decision is sufficiently important that I will certainly look at and evaluate all those materials.  The decision of another school is not a useful indicator of whether I should admit you.

Indeed, if you tell me you have an offer from another top program, I might even be more cautious about offering you admission.  Why?  If I make all my initial offers to students who end up going to other schools, then I have to go back and dig through the applications and find the ones that didn't already accept an offer, which by that time will be lower quality applicants.  I know of one program where this happened last year and they resolved to make more strong offers to the second tier of (still quite strong) applicants this year.