A girl from another high school apparently had her brother (freshman in med school) write her college essay for her. This infuriates me because we are applying to a lot of the same schools, and obviously if she had written her own essay the caliber would be quite different and be a more fair representation of her as a candidate. Is there anything I can/should do about this? does anyone have any advice to ease my mind. I’m just a little ticked off because I could also have someone else write my essay, but I don’t because it’s simply unethical.
Don’t know about other schools, but Columbia says they use the writing portion of the SAT and ACT as verification of the writing style and consistency of language when looking at a student’s application essay.
Please don’t eat yourself up with worry over another’s unscrupulousness. (And do not let any of your family members become patients in that brother’s medical practice once he is licensed.)
Good luck to you.
There is not much you can do unfortunately other than notify your recpetive school faculty or authority, like a principal. I agree with you that it kind of sucks, and so many people will have even paid proxy companies to write their essays for them.
i hope there is some justice
-Lucas
- You are most likely competing against tens of thousands of applicants. One person with a better than typical essay won’t make a discernible difference.
- College admissions officers claim to be excellent at sniffing out essays not written by the applicant. There is a real chance that the girl could have her chances hurt by having her brother write her essay.
- Don’t worry about things out of your control.
- In application process as in life you are best off doing things honorably. Those who lie and cheat always have to wonder if or when their dishonesty might come back to bite them.
Sadly, their confidence is unwarranted.
Sad to say, you are competing against many, many applicants, including others in your class, whose essays have been heavily edited and revised, if not entirely written, by siblings, parents, teachers, tutors, college counselors, etc. So don’t let knowing specifically about one essay make you crazy. I personally feel the college essay is a joke because there is no way to authenticate it. (And it’s nonsense to suggest that anyone could draw any valid conclusions about authorship by comparing an SAT writing sample, done on the fly in a high pressure environment, to an essay that could have been worked over for weeks in multiple iterations with reference to writing manuals, a thesaurus, a dictionary, etc.)
Frankly, chances are her brother couldn’t write such a great essay that this affects your own chances. Or hers. It would take more savvy that a first year in med school would have. We don’t know what college he attended, but his experience with his own essay would be at least 5 years ago.
I wouldn’t say adcoms are ‘excellent’ at the sniffing out, but there are distinct clues they can look for. And I wouldn’t say that’s the SAT or ACT writing score.
Not the score, the actual essay.
They do not see the actual SAT or ACT Writing essay.
That is not what was communicated during my meeting there. The admissions officer did not speak of the score as a component of application assessment but of the essay itself as the instrument which would be examined. This when there was concern, or a need for verification of the level of language used by the applicant.
They don’t get essays. They only see score. As it was mentioned above, SAT essay cannot be a good indication of writing abilities since it is done on a fly.
That was what my daughter was … concerned about. Though she scored top score she came home and took a look at the essay as submitted during the exam and exclaimed, “Good luck to them trying to even read that!”
Still, it was the information disseminated. Or at least, both she and I heard it and did not confer on the point until I saw her looking at her essay.
Sorry W2E, but I think something was left confusing when those adcoms spoke of this.
Forewarned is forearmed.
That’s fine either way, in my daughter’s case. I am not allowed to go near her when she is working, so, no worry there. Interesting to see a math-minded child work on her creative and exploratory writing side. Really happy when she is happy. Wouldn’t want to lead the OP off, though.
So, OP, the consensus here is there will be no review of the SAT Writing as submitted during the exam, so perhaps the other student’s brother will (unfortunately) successfully pass off his work as hers. Don’t let it give you a headache, though. The strength of your application should work to reveal who you are, and speak to what you bring to the table.
Good luck to you.
They can access the actual essays, I read that on the college board site for the SAT. Don’t want to look it up now.
OK, it was easy enough
https://professionals.collegeboard.com/testing/sat-reasoning/scores/online-essay-viewing
Thanks BP. I can dig more later. All I can say is that it’s not happening now, for the U I know. While this (like the insistence adcoms check your FB pages) sounds like a big threat, there isn’t the time and there would need to be strong reason to cut away and go off checking a Sat am quick test for a stylistic match. And adcoms are not English teachers.
For the most competitives, imo, it would need to be a pretty driving reason- eg, checking wholesale cheating from a district. Or some of the after the fact tales of cheating to get into Harvard. Yes, they can see if a W score is low. But right now, there isn’t the same weight on the W. And, it is ok to have some guidance on the essays- it’s just not right to have someone write them for you.
OP isn’t even in the same high school as this other kid.
The idea that anyone can tell anything from an SAT essay is pretty ludicrous. My oldest was a competent writer when it came to AP essays, research papers and even his college application essays. But the SAT essays format made him freeze. Younger son wrote fluently on the SAT essay, but at least at that time used to have to check and recheck his work for grammar (lack of commas mostly) and spelling errors. I saw the printouts of both kids’ essays and frankly their handwriting is so terrible I don’t know how anyone could read them.
In any even there’s not much you can do about someone receiving too much help on their essays. I wouldn’t trust a med student to be that good a writer frankly.
Different schools have different advice about how much help to get here’s what Tufts says:
from http://admissions.tufts.edu/blogs/inside-admissions/post/application-checklist-the-supplement/
I wouldn’t say ludicrous, because it does allow those who do not freeze up the opportunity to perform in a near-extemporaneous setting, and they are able to be graded to some standard. Kids do freeze up, but also on multiple choice, bubble tests. It is something that happens.
No it’s ludicrous - especially the SAT essays whose questions are so convoluted you could spend half the time trying to figure out how the prompt is related to the question. The ACT essays aren’t nearly so weird. That kind of first draft writing really has very little relationship to how your college essays sound.
Supposedly the Writing portion will become more analytical and call on critical thinking skills. The W essay will be optional. Etc. This lay out current vs new, though it’s Kaplan http://www.kaptest.com/sat/kaplan-sat-prep/sat-test-change