<p>"Another time, a broker and her spouse hired Ms. Haboush to ghostwrite the parent essay required with their sons application to the Dalton School. She has since written a number of college-application essays for agents children and one for a broker who was applying to the Wharton School."</p>
<p>Hiring a professional writer to ghost-write the parent essay for Dalton? Fine. Hiring a writer for a college application essay? Only cheating scum do it. I hope every single one of those students got rejected from all their schools.</p>
<p>I think this goes on all over the place and frankly, it depresses me. I wish all colleges had a way to make the kid sit in a room and write the essay by themselves!</p>
<p>I have heard so many times that colleges can “spot” ghostwritten essays…but I just don’t have the confidence that it is true. After all, there are some amazing kid writers out there as well.</p>
<p>Maybe I’m just feeling sorry for myself since we can’t afford all these fancy preparation tools (and I don’t really mean the ghostwritten essay because I think that’s horrible, but all the fancy college counselors who help you prepare your app., etc.). </p>
<p>Even parents are out there writing their kids applications for them. My neighbor did all her son’s apps by herself including the essays and the short answers, and he got into some very nice schools (Boston College, Tulane, NYU). No one “recognized” that it wasn’t him. She is also editing her other child’s senior (college) thesis…the kid sends it to her, she rewrites it and sends it back, part by part.</p>
<p>Frankly, I don’t see why colleges don’t just use the writing sections of the SATs and/or ACTs to evaluate writing. Then the college essay could just be used to tell a bit about the applicant, explain goals or blemishes of an application. I think that writing ability should only be judged by what the admissions counselors know the applicant wrote. One big problem with this solution is that so many schools are test optional now!</p>
<p>Do you think colleges should look more closely at the essay section of the SAT? That’s the only piece that is clearly, solely the product of the student.</p>
<p>^ Yeah, but the SAT essay is a strange piece of writing to a strange prompt under strange circumstances. I don’t know that the application essays are about writing skills so much as they are about getting to know the student. Which, of course, makes it even worse to have a ghost writer… but I don’t know that the SAT essay is a good substitute for the “this is who I am” essays on college apps.</p>
<p>I think that at least the smaller and/or most selective colleges probably do compare SAT/ACT essays with the application essays for reasonable consistency. I think that’s part of what they mean when they say they can “spot” a ghost-written essay.</p>
<p>Both my kids write **much **better than anything they’ve written for SAT essays. Some colleges ask for graded essays from school. I’m sure they could be faked too, but at least they are more similar to the sorts of essays they are writing in college. I figure the 5’s my kids got on the various history APs they have taken should be some proof they are not complete slouches in the writing department.</p>
<p>From my brief observation of this, the “admissions advisors” to business schools (MBA’s) often go waaay beyond merely offering advice when it comes to “editing” on the all-important essays. </p>
<p>That may be the one set of essays that Haboush wrote that was “SOP” for many business school applicants.</p>
<p>I really don’t think the SAT essay is a good depiction of a person’s writing skills. The first problem is you’re only given 25 minutes. Even the shortest in-class essays are at least 40 minutes, and most are about an hour. The second problem is that the topics are incredibly bland and pointless. It’s a lot easier (for me at least) to write a good essay exploring the pros and cons of the Industrial Revolution than about whether it’s a good idea to take your time to make a decision. The third problem is that the essay is given right at the beginning of the test at 8 AM. The beginning is when everybody is most vulnerable to nervousness. Plus I’d much rather be still asleep that early on a Saturday morning. The fourth problem is that if colleges are going to consider the SAT essay more, should the person taking the test try to write as best they can, or should they aim for the highest score possible? And no, this is not the same thing. I’ve seen several very poorly written essays get 12’s just because they used big words and filled up the allotted space. This isn’t to say the people that wrote them aren’t good writers, it’s just that that’s not what the SAT essay tests.</p>
<p>“I have heard so many times that colleges can “spot” ghostwritten essays…but I just don’t have the confidence that it is true. After all, there are some amazing kid writers out there as well.”</p>
<p>Interviews are one major way that one can tell whose essay was ghost written. One student whom I interviewed for college brought to the interview his essay, which was amazing. However, his interview was awful because he had concrete, cliched thinking and a lack of intellectual curiosity, general knowledge, and analytical ability. There was absolutely no way that he could have written the sophisticated, insightful essay that he showed me.</p>
<p>It seems like a cat and mouse game that is easily solved by using the SAT and ACT essay section. Who says it needs to be a perfect work of art? Everyone wakes up at 8am to take the SAT or ACT, everyone has the same the same timed test and the same prompt. Anything outside of testing center can be written by someone else, or over edited by others. I really think that if the essay is to judge the applicant’s ability to write, it should be essay portion of standardized testing that gets judged. JMO.</p>
<p>Oh, and mathmom, my kids also write much better than what they can produce in a few minutes on standardized testing. I would think that most people should be able to do better when they have a month or more to write a paper, vs. 25 minutes to write a few paragraphs.</p>
<p>^I’m not even talking about research papers they’ve (theoretically) had a month to write, I’m talking about any essay I’ve ever seen them write. The SAT essays are just weird. Strange little quotes, followed by vaguely related prompts with a formula to answer that just seems so artificial. I’m sure you can sort out really bad writers from the adequate, but I don’t think it’s much of a sorting mechanism for the really good ones - the original thinkers and the creative writers, or even the solid writers who can answer a typical essay question on a topic they’ve studied.</p>
<p>My kids SAT essays were okay. They were reasonably well organized, and had few if any grammatical mistakes. It’s been shown that the longest essays tend to get the highest scores. I’d just rather, if colleges were looking at essays, it were the AP essays.</p>
<p>mathmom, I don’t see those essays as ideal. I have read that the longest essays tend to get the best scores and I would not even propose that the scores are necessarily used at all. I’d like to see that those essays are directly read by admission counselors. You don’t have to worry. There are just too many writing optional schools, or standardized test optional schools, so my idea would never happen anyway.</p>
<p>I agree that it may be helpful to have a more standardized process, but the SAT essay just isn’t the solution. Perhaps if there were a separate essay test that had everybody write 2 or 3 essays in a two hour period on real topics. I’m sure the College Board would be happy to make yet another required test ($$$), and maybe colleges would agree too.</p>
<p>^^^LOL, Thiscouldbeheaven, yes, an excellent means for more $$ for the CB, and perhaps the test prep centers would organize practice sessions for this too! You have just found yet another new untapped way for the all testing businesses to make more money! Oh, and this is an excellent way to kill yet another Saturday morning! Still, it is probably a fair way to access writing ability if everyone has the same time to write and the same prompt choices.</p>
<p>This reminds me of the process now to get a high level Federal job. There is so much writing required that there is a cottage industry of consultants to help write the essays. Busy execs don’t want to take the time so they dictate the outline to the writer and the writer knows all the buzz words to fill in. It is so well known that those who don’t do it are at a disadvantage. A shame that all of these processes are coming to this. If the system did not reward those who use it, it woudl not flourish.</p>
<p>As it currently is set up, the SAT essay by itself is not all that useful. My son, who is dyslexic but has learned to be a good but slow writer, said that after reviewing the way that the SAT essays were scored, he had to unlearn some of the things he learned how to write well to get a good score on the SAT essay. He did get a good score, but only by following what he’d discerned to be ETS’s otherwise irrelevant grading criteria.</p>
<p>As far as I can tell, in this hypercompetitive college admissions world, one needs to write the college essay to stand out amidst the hundreds, nay thousands, of other kids who also have great grades and board scores. “Is this a kid I’d like to have dinner with or asking questions in my class?” Colleges appear to use the essay to select against “stiffs.” (They don’t want kids who worked very hard to get good grades and scores but are merely good hoop-jumpers with no originality or spark of life). When my son and I reviewed “successful” college essays, it seemed that the essays were typically thoughtful, reflective with a little bit of detachment and often light irony, and a bit quirky. So, he wrote one of those. It was, in my humble and biased opinion, really good. Unfortunately, there isn’t any reason someone can’t interview the kid and ghostwrite something that the kid couldn’t. A really good ghostwriter could probably write with a few elements that were a little less sophisticated – to make the essay seem like it was written by a HS student.</p>
<p>But, what adcoms resonate to is a bit of a moving target. When everyone starts writing reflective, quirky, a little detached and ironic, then adcoms will start looking for something else to separate the wheat from the chaff.</p>
<p>I don’t know why anyone is surprised. These essays have had ghostwriters since day one. Frankly, I don’t see the point of essays. I don’t buy that argument that it gives the adcoms more insight because there is plenty of info on the students within the rest of the app. Colleges were able to find perfectly acceptable students in the days before essays.</p>
<p>While I deplore the writer’s ethics, the real moral failure is in the modeling the parents are doing and what the kids are learning by accepting illicit “help”. The karmic equalizer will be in what the children fail to learn or master in their own lives as a result of this “help”. Will they be able to avoid writing independently the rest of their lives? Or manage not to have deadlines they have to meet personally and independently? The worst outcome is when they do have to make an independent effort, are not as successful as they (or the parents) expected–and then acccept a label of “failure” when they are just really learning to try. </p>
<p>Giving kids “feedback” is legitimate when it is genuinely a response to work they have done themselves; doing it for them isn’t honest or helpful to anyone.</p>