<p>^ Packaging the good (applicant) the way the buyer (adcoms) like.</p>
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<p>And in retrospect, I did very well based on admission results and from an adcom who read my app/essay at the very college I ended up attending. </p>
<p>Moreover, the culture at my NYC public magnet was such that paying someone else to write your essay for you or to do your app was the equivalent of communicating “I’m too lazy and/or stupid to do them myself.” </p>
<p>A reputation which is not only bad while in HS, but tends to be remembered decades afterwards for alumni reunions or whether fellow alums are willing to help further your job search or career goals…or to deep six them.</p>
<p>Cobrat,</p>
<p>Your personal example is only tangencial to this issue. No one is questioning what happened with you or your HS colleagues. The merit of the question is: are essays a legitimate way to evaluate college applications? How much weight should they have?</p>
<p>My argument, as per my original post, is that essays are not a good instrument because Adcom’s reading is very subjective, and because it disproportionally favors those who have access to external help.</p>
<p>^ ^</p>
<p>So how are adcoms, especially those at small private colleges with certain campus cultures/missions/values evaluate students so they could maintain the continuity of those and ensure a critical mass of students are a “good fit” for it or at least, be able to civilly tolerate being a minority who are not? Keep in mind that a change of a few dozen students or less may be enough to disturb/destroy this very continuity depending on the size and campus culture of a given institution. </p>
<p>Not every student is going to be able to afford travel expenses and time off from school to travel for on-campus interviews/tours. Alumni interviewers may not always be available and depending on the college…their interviewing ability/weight given in the admission process may be so variable as to be hit or miss. Moreover, interviews tend to overwhelmingly favor extroverted type students which places introverts at a distinct disadvantage. </p>
<p>GC reports, teacher recommendations, and grading could be manipulated by GCs/teachers playing favorites for factors having nothing to do with academics…such as the socio-economic status/prominence of a student’s parents, whether their parents are liked/disliked for being non-conformist in that school community/neighborhood/small town, or whether the student has an upper/upper-middle class loudmouthed litigious parent threatening to sue the teacher/school system for not awarding their “darling” a “richly deserved A” and the school system’s doesn’t have the money/desire the negative publicity of parent instigated litigation…however unmerited it may be. </p>
<p>That’s also not mentioning how standardized tests could also be gamed by those with the cash as demonstrated by the case of students in posh Little Neck, NY.</p>
<p>In the first part of your post you provide some good arguments. Indeed I would agree that if some college has very specific missions, essays can be a valuable instrument, as you suggest. I take this is more the exception the general rule.</p>
<p>The final two paragraph, I cannot agree very much. First, as you yourself stated, school records are more difficult to fake. Second, as already mentioned in this thread, it is much more difficult to hire a professional test taker than a professional editor/private counselor. The fact that you mention this indicates that this thread is degenerating to a personal debate in which we are trying to prove each other wrong at any costs, thus I will prefer to check out this discussion.</p>
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That may be true, but Adcoms don’t read the essays in a vacuum, they are part of a package. When they read the essay, they know the zipcode where the student resides, and the school he attends. Don’t you think they have a sense which students might be in a position to hire that outside help? It is quite possible (and I would think probable) that they keep that in mind when reading the essays. An outstanding essay from an otherwise mediocre candidate is going to elicit a question of “why?” </p>
<p>If the essay makes little sense in context with the rest of the application, eyebrows will be raised. Yes, whoever packages the essay may be able to fit it with the test scores and transcript, but what happens when its contents contradict the letters of recommendation? Given the Adcoms some credit, they are intelligent people. It is going to be the rare teen who is capable of hiding a terrible home life, or the myriad other ideas that might make for a compelling essay. If there is no hint in the letters, or elsewhere, it’s going to raise questions.</p>
<p>Personally speaking, an essay without an interview is utterly useless (same as a cover letter without an interview). Essays, to me, are simply attempts to socially engineer the make up of the student body; nothing more, nothing less…</p>
<p>Tutors, SAT prep, private schools, expensive ECs like skiing and sailing, expensive travel teams and summer sports development camps, better schools in more expensive districts, books in the home, families that take kids to museums and cultural events, travel, cultural capital in general: all things that are affected by family $$.</p>
<p>Where do you draw the line? How do you decide what makes one candidate “good” and what makes the next some kind of cheater based on family ability to pay?</p>
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Simply incredulous!! Is this for real? CC is quite a rude place, so let me be polite. Perhaps, you embellished a bit too much trying to bolster your argument? I wonder about these basic questions:[ul]
[<em>]What sort of outfit are we talking about? Seems like some one thought clever to hire a super-smart foreigner on the cheap for exploitation, without scrutiny, got burnt by fraud instead. Wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the work is L3/maintenance of legacy code, and a body-shop was involved.
[</em>]You mean to say you guys hire without a technical interview? or without verifying references of an experienced applicant, guru no less? May be it speaks to the quality of the interviewers? and what about the project architect, group lead, and hiring manager? All a bunch of effing morons??
[li]Perhaps, it was all in the hands of the HR department or a C-level and you guys got stuck!! Let me speculate and say that both HR and the hiring executive relied on infallible “cover letter” (akin to personal essays) and “resume” and simply out-sourced their responsibility to an “IIT pedigree”.[/li][/ul]
Hope there is nothing subliminal against IITs and or indian programmers. The internet is rife with them, and there are plenty of sites where anecdotes like this are glorified. PS: no sour grapes vis-a-vis CS, career, success, essays, college admissions, etc </p>
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<p>While I don’t entirely agree with the second sentence, I have some agreement with the first sentence above. While not “utterly” (necessarily), I do think that a personal interview is a check – positively and negatively – against an essay. </p>
<p>Of course, that assumes that an interviewer is at least an adequate interviewer, which I’ve discovered is not necessarily the case. 
It takes some personal skill to be an interviewer, some listening skills especially, and some even modest practice with this “art.” A couple of my students recently had very bad interviewers: one openly mocked the student, which (not surprisingly!) made her freeze, and the encounter devolved from there. Another interviewer was the world’s worst conversationalist, causing enormous awkwardness throughout.</p>
<p>But yes, even a thoroughly-student-written-without-external-edits essay can be misleading. What I mean is, there are students who find it difficult to articulate Who They Are for a couple of valid reasons: (1) They’re still discovering who they are; that is supposed to be what adolescence is for; (2) They find it hard to verbalize many non-verbal aspects of themselves. (Hmmm) This affects all kinds of students. There’s something counterintuitive about this. We often think of the quiet person as someone who does better behind the written word than face to face. Not necessarily. Again, a perceptive interviewer can often guide/coax the true face of the subject to emerge, and that has value for the student.</p>
<p>My objection to the essays, or to certain varieties of essays, is how forced and “cute” they have become. Some of us adults may enjoy some of the questions or themes (such as Williams’ 'Window, etc.), but they do not necessarily resonate with high school students, and do not necessarily illuminate the student’s “world,” let alone personality, intellectual capacity, or fit for the school - supposedly 3 things the college is aiming to discern. Many of them appear to be one of 2 things: (a) a form of manipulation (appearing to be “trick questions” with hidden agendas) or (b) strictly creative writing exercises, which for many are unnecessarily time-consuming and somewhat abusive, imo.</p>
<p>Look, I love to write,and I love to read good writing, both from students and adults, including all kinds of nonprofessional writers. But I have many students right now whose grades are suffering first semester of their academically intense senior year because of the unreal number and variety of college essays. They, and sometimes I, see it as a form of torture. Many of these students are not “using” the admissions process for the most competitive schools, but for schools which do fit their needs, and some of those students include those applying to a few guaranteed med programs, and they have modest and realistic college lists. This is not fair to them: “Senior Superlative”? Starting a no-risk venture? (The latter might be appropriate for a business school applicant, but this is NOT for a business program.) </p>
<p>Penn was explicit this year: In an arrticle in the Daily Pennsylvanian, the Director of Alumni Interviewing said that the Ben Franklin prompt was chosen to reduce the number of applications this year, from last year’s 31,000. </p>
<p>What I do agree with is the Supplementals that require the student to articule Why This College? It is the one which students tend to struggle the most with, but I think it’s one of the time-consuming questions which are fair and appropriate. If you cannot describe why you want to go there, the college does not belong on your list.</p>
<p>I’m very much with OP on this one. My kids and practically all their classmates spent more time trying to make their essay sound good than present factual accounts of their interests. At least for my older two, it was before I really knew cc or anything much about the admissions process, and they ended up writing essays in the manner their school counselor or some other “admissions guru” advised them to do. The bottom line was that the two out of my three with good scores got into their first choice, and it’s questionable what role their essay played in it - I suspect full pay and scores were a bigger factor.</p>
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<p>However, the college’s motivation for this question is often to reject “safety” applicants in the name of yield protection. So an answer like “[College] has the major(s) that I am interested in, has reasonable cost according to the net price calculator, and is a place I would like to attend even though it is a safety” would not probably not be effective from the applicant’s point of view.</p>
<p>“Gaming” the “why this college?” question from the applicant’s point of view means convincing the reader that the college is one of the applicant’s top choices, perhaps in competition with peer colleges that it competes with (winning about half the time) in cross-admit battles.</p>
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<p>Obviously. As is their right.</p>
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<p>Obviously again. I still find it appropriate for the college to ask. It’s a lot harder to fake it than you might realize, although plenty attempt to. In general, the colleges which are most ill-fitting for the student are those most difficult to write for. It can only be gamed so far.</p>
<p>But how many students apply to poorly fitting colleges (that care about “level of interest”) to begin with?</p>
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<p>Yep, unfortunately. Took place in a medium sized financial firm and the fabricating new hire turned instant ex-employee was total operation managed by the HR department with practically no input from my supervisor nor the department head. </p>
<p>Granted, this was in a period when techie/CS folks were in such demand that there was widespread fears any decent talent would get swiped quickly if they took too long to hire them. </p>
<p>Even so, this was a highly irregular case as I was not only interviewed by HR, but also by 4 members of the department…including the department head and my prospective supervisor before they took me aboard. </p>
<p>Yep, a good case study why technical related hires…especially in non-tech firms should never be left solely to the HR department.</p>
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Utter Rubbish!
I am sorry to be so sarcastic and blunt, but you missed the meaning of my earlier post.</p>
<p>This kind of hiring, if it actually happened, means that the job was meaningless and they were looking for a warm body at best. Most likely, your supervisor/department head were asleep at the wheel or were given an already hired resume by a C/B level, and had no choice but to blame HR in front of direct reports, once the egregious fraud came to light. You took their inane explanation and the misdirecting pat-on-your-back and seemed to have become a legend in your own mind. Next, you put it all on public display with that self aggrandizing fabricator turned in by yours truly, ain’t he a gift to the mankind narrative. All of it in a less than competent defense of vacuous arguments you won’t back down from. That about some it up? It may be a case study all right, but not for what you purport it to be. </p>
<p>You do seem to have the gift of the gab, and very good writing skills (better than my ESL skills anyways). However, also important are: critical thinking, originality of ideas, willingness to be persuaded, etc. I can’t imagine you being a parent of a college age kid, given the evident immaturity. So you must be a recent grad with too much time on your hands, or have something to prove to someone. I am not sure you are impressing anyone on the Parents Forum, but I am quite positive you are annoying many. Please continue to exercise your right to post, and I will see if there is an ignore list function on CC.</p>
<p>PS: I would have ignored your original post, but I got sucked in because you needlessly came close to sullying IITs and poor Indian programmers (attempting to play to the gallery, may be?).</p>
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<p>A fraud which came to light because my colleagues and I found his lack of basic computer skills was really suspicious, especially considering the position for which he was being hired.</p>
<p>And it was a vital position within our group as his extremely short useless tenure and rapid departure delayed many of our large projects because we were short-staffed and needed another highly experienced programming guru to ease the load…especially among the more senior folks. He was also supposed to be a technical mentor to more junior employees such as myself at the time. </p>
<p>The entire hiring took my department head/supervisor off-guard because they expected to continue the usual multiple interviews as they did with me and other colleagues before extending the offer. Instead, HR ended up short-circuiting the process and made the offer after only 2 interviews with HR staff with no technical experience of any kind to effectively assess him. </p>
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<p>Your demonstrated umbrage here is very odd, considering it was the fabricator who LIED about having attended IIT or being a highly experienced programmer on his resume. </p>
<p>Since he never attended college of any kind nor had any experience as a programmer…because he LIED ABOUT ALL OF THAT, my recounting this case cannot logically be a reflection on actual IIT graduates or Indian programmers. </p>
<p>Turned out the fabricator never belonged in either group.</p>
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<p>Exactly what I was thinking about you, PLME21maibe. Cobrat is a valued long-time poster on this board. As a newbie, you should take a less combative tone if you wish to positively influence people – and perhaps even avoid get banned by one of the moderators.</p>
<p>@cobrat: Did you seriously not mean THE “Indian Institute of Technology” (plural) when you wrote IIT? The tone of the narrative implied as much … It would still read OK I substituted IIT with MIT or CalTech but not “Illinois Institute of Technology” (no offence to the fine school). You say that fabricator is not an ethnic south-asian Indian and did not attend or claimed to have graduated from one of the Indian Institute(s) of Technology. Rhetorically, what groups did the purported fabricator actually belong to anyway I wonder? I am curious to hear if you wish to answer.</p>
<p>I am still super skeptical about this explanation, but I will withdraw my umbrage out of decency, lest I come across as close minded, and also for the more expedient purpose of disengaging without rancor.</p>
<p>Let’s move on, and others can draw their own conclusions… Just as I click submit, I saw that LoremIpsum did draw his. LOL.</p>
<p>PLME21maibe just got a rep from me.</p>
<p>I am also in the camp of Cobrat made up the whole incident. I have been at various finance companies, I have never heard of HR hiring anyone without hiring manager’s approval. HR just wouldn’t have the expertise to hire people with specific skills.</p>