<p>Fascinating. I found the issue about the different uses of language in the essays especially interesting. </p>
<p>How many students go from secondary school in China to university in the US?</p>
<p>Fascinating. It must be so difficult just to write an essay in another language to begin with. I speak another language but i couldn’t.</p>
<p>It isn’t just Chinese which uses flowery language. We lived in Belgium and went to lots of local tourist sites in both Belgium and the surrounding countries. SInce we could read both English and French, we could see why some of the brochures sounded so ridiculous in English. They were originally written in French and sounded fine in that language. Then someone with rudimentary translation skills literally translated the French into English. At that point, it didn’t sound right since it was too flowery. I have no idea whether the French speaking students who may apply to our colleges also have this problem with essays.</p>
<p>Why don’t they just hire someone to write the essays for them.:)</p>
<p>@ucbalumnus, There may be less than 10,000 of them enroll every year in the whole system. In China itself, admission rate for high school graduates varies as well. Depending on which time period you are talking about. Back in 1977-1979, there were merely 2% of high school graduate got into universities. Now the ratio is much higher, due to larger numbers of universities. The top ones are still better than the rest. Graduates from Bejing U. , Qinghua U. etc, are still in high demand, as far as employment is concerned.</p>
<p>If we are talking about Chinese students getting into graduate schools, the number may be much higher.</p>
<p>*How many students go from secondary school in China to university in the US? *</p>
<p>I wonder if there are any stats anywhere. Similarly, how many int’ls total go to undergrad in the US? It seems like every campus boasts about having a 100+ int’l students on campus.</p>
<p>^I read it somewhere that there were over 40k Chinese undergraduate students in US universities in 2010.</p>
<p>If the current trend holds, there will be many more high school students coming over from China in the next few years to get undergraduate degrees in the U.S. Some US colleges are heavily recruiting in China for full pay students.</p>
<p>There was an interesting article in NYT: [Recruiting</a> in China Pays Off for U.S. Colleges](<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/education/12college.html]Recruiting”>From China, More Students Pursue Dream of American Education - The New York Times).</p>
<p>I agree - this is really interesting. It parallels some of the most common misunderstandings that many of my Asian friends have about what is valued in the American educational experience (it’s common for my colleagues who emigrated from Asia to encourage their HS students to drop as many out-of-class activities as possible in order to focus exclusively on classwork and grades).</p>
<p>My D has a Chinese friend who has become a friend of our family. She is remarkably bright and engaging, and has developed 100% fluent, accent-free American adolescent speech. Anyone who meets her would assume that she was born and raised in the U.S. I offered to help proofread her college application essays and I was dumbfounded. I read through what sounded like a Saturday Night Live parody of a novice motivational speaker who was trying too hard, and thought “what in the world is this stuff?” I advised her to simply respond verbally to the essay using a tape recorder and then transcribe what she’d said, since her verbal skills were flawless. I’ve since read over essays from Asian CC posters and thought “what is this stuff?,” told them that the inspirational allegories read very awkwardly in English and had them respond very easily with prose that was concise and clear. This article explains a lot!</p>
<p>Back in the last century, I worked for an SAT/GRE/GMAT/TOEFL exam prep and college placement business in South America, and also volunteered occasionally at the local office of [EducationUSA</a> | Study Abroad, Student Visa, University Fairs, College Applications and Study in the U.S. / America](<a href=“http://www.educationusa.info/]EducationUSA”>http://www.educationusa.info/) The people I worked with and volunteered with in that country could have written about 90% of this article. Navigating the US college admission process is extremely challenging for people who come from different cultural backgrounds. This is why I often recommend that new international students who appear here at CC start their search at their closest EducationUSA office. The staff in those offices “get” both the students from those countries, and the US educational system.</p>
<p>As for writing their own letters of recommendation, lots of international students end up doing that because of the language issue. Happydad wrote all of his for graduate school. He asked the referees what they wanted to say, typed it up, had them proof-read it and sign it. All of his referees were competent readers of English, but none of them felt comfortable writing it.</p>
<p>Based on these papers, I have grossly underestimated the number of Chinese students enrolled in US…
[Record</a> number of Chinese students flock to US colleges - CSMonitor.com](<a href=“http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2010/1115/Record-number-of-Chinese-students-flock-to-US-colleges]Record”>Record number of Chinese students flock to US colleges - CSMonitor.com)</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2010/1115/Study-in-America-Top-5-countries-sending-students-to-US/China[/url]”>http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2010/1115/Study-in-America-Top-5-countries-sending-students-to-US/China</a></p>
<p>
This is not that uncommon when you get to college and grad school. A busy professor will often ask the student to write the first draft of a letter of recommendation.</p>
<p>I remember seeing a post on CC by a guy who makes a good living as an hired gun for students in their Ph.D. or MD programs… That was an eye-opener…</p>
<p>
I would just like to point out that this is not cheating.</p>
<p>I’ve known many international students who have applied to schools here and are currently here. For the most part , those who have the wherewithal to apply to the US go through a company or consultants who walk them through the process. Who knows who writes those essays?</p>
<p>For graduate studies, my good friend who is a professor at a university told me that they refuse to even consider applications from certain countries unless someone in the department knows the applicant. Fraud is that rampant.</p>
<p>Just talking about the essay-writing and language issue - I was listening to this song on Youtube and was reminded of this thread.</p>
<p>[YouTube</a> - Shui Diao Ge Tou by Su Shi](<a href=“Shui Diao Ge Tou by Su Shi - YouTube”>Shui Diao Ge Tou by Su Shi - YouTube)</p>
<p>It’s a famous Chinese poem/song, and the translation given in the video is pretty faithful to the original - far from perfect, but close enough to demonstrate the point. The Chinese language is very very economical expressing lofty ideas. The last few lines are some of the most famous in Chinese literature, and looking at it now I am pretty stunned - six words, world of meaning, vs English’s relatively flat ten words.</p>
<p>Though as MilitaryMom says, Chinese isn’t the only language where you can observe the “flowery” effect. Perhaps we might as well argue the reverse - that directness, subtlety and understatement are traits of the English language. As far as I can tell, the word “understatement” doesn’t really exist in any other language I’ve checked…</p>