To the best of my knowledge, there are still human readers.
Well since the ACT/SAT concept was introduced by me let me just quickly clarify - I would add an essay question(s) that would be in addition to the normal standardized test essay questions and make them more your typical admissions essay questions that provide the opportunity for personal insight. I guess I’d like to eliminate the team approach to college essays and also make it very efficient time wise. I realize many great kids do a wonderful job on essays and others get a variety of help.
“make them more your typical admissions essay questions that provide the opportunity for personal insight.”
I get where you’re coming from, but this wouldn’t eliminate the team approach. If the question is open-ended, the essay prep will just happen before the test.
My kids wrote great essays for AP tests, but they really, really hated the kind of quick think of some ideas on a topic you’d never thought about before approach of the SAT essays. (I think the ACT essays had better questions, but they never took it.)
IMO if you are trying to get an idea if a kid is good at the kind of writing required for college the APs are a reasonable approximation of midterms and finals.
And my kids had friends who knew the tricks to score higher on the old SAT W. (Because certain structural devices overrode content, I asked about mechanical scoring, above, because I know first-hand that they tested this for the GRE.)
I think trying to replace untimed writing with another std test format is trying to drive a square peg into a round hole. You’re trying to make a centralized scoring service replace the individual qualitative writing reviewing by adcoms for that college. Again, trying imagine scores as supreme. It misses the point.
I think that the essay portion of the ACT/SAT could used to confirm an applicant’s though processes, writing abilities and level of sophistication in expressing him/herself. I daresay that a kid that writes in a sophisticated manner in a prepared essay, assuming that the work is original, will write better, employ more sophisticated vocabulary, and use more complex grammatical structures when writing extemporaneously than a kid that doesn’t. If there’s a significant mis-match between level of expression, something is obviously wrong.
Adcoms want to hear a kid’s voice, but they also want a well-edited piece of writing. They often encourage kids to show their essays to adults for the adults to proofread. Doing so is not employing a “team approach” as long as the kid is doing the writing and the adults are just making editorial comments and suggestions.
I didn’t look at the Stanford application. Maybe he did complete the supplemental essays with a sincere perspective, maybe he didn’t. I don’t think we can really say at this point. What we can say is that Stanford was probably not his first choice since he applied RD. In my perspective, this means the #Black Lives Matter x100 response on his essay was not really a risk at all. I feel that the people at Stanford reviewing his essay should have recognized that.
He is clearly an accomplished student to be in contention for acceptance to Yale and Stanford, and I actually admire his perspective. He seems to know that his future isn’t tied to the approval/acceptance of a specific university. But let’s be real here. Over forty thousand kids apply to Stanford each year. I think it’s safe to say that at least thirty thousand have outstanding academic credentials that make them statistically indistinguishable from each other. To assume that anyone applying to Stanford can simply “bang out a winning application in ten minutes” is naive.
I know from your other posts that you are in no conceivable way naive, so maybe my remarks about effort were misconstrued. I don’t believe that effort alone is sufficient for a successful essay. You need to have the accomplishments to back it up. I agree with others that have posted that the essays should fit in with the application as a whole and reflect or expand on ECs, courses taken, volunteer work, etc. listed within the application. My point is that in this particular case the applicant showed no effort an no real risk taking. If you’re going to dissect the HS academic rigor, standardized test scores, EC’s, and supplemental essays for 30K qualified students, then you should absolutely consider the effort placed into the specific essay that we are discussing.
“If there’s a significant mis-match between level of expression, something is obviously wrong.”
That’s the big value I see in controlled-circumstances essays. They’re an honesty check.
I am curious after reading some comments above:
Do colleges see the actual essays kids wrote for the ACT and SAT, or just the scores?
Schools can see them if they want to. They are not delivered automatically. I don’t know how many highly selective schools make use of the service.
http://www.act.org/content/act/en/products-and-services/essay-view-request.html
My understanding of the SAT and ACT essays is that the sheer volume of essays to be graded and therefore graders needed to grade the essays forces a very mechanical rubric for grading that ends up with two problems - 1) even with a very defined rubric reproducibility is a challenge, and 2) trying to make it even somewhat reproducible over a large number of human graders makes any creativity in the writing a dangerous gamble.
I’m guessing reproducibility isn’t all that high for adcom scoring of individual university essays either, but that doesn’t matter because it really isn’t the point of the essays.
I saw the copies of my kids essays with the q and a service. I feel sorry for anyone trying to read their chicken scratches.
The question isn’t their importance, it’s whether all of them are read by all colleges. And they’re probably not, the applicants who don’t pass the first screen and on the other end, applicants who are guaranteed admission, the recruitable athlete at a revenue-generating sport.
And did an adcom ever say on record, oh yeah the essay was bad, that’s why we rejected them, or put up rejected essays on their website?
I know we aren’t supposed to post blogs here, but go to The Critical Reader Blog by Erica Meltzer and read her entry for Oct 30th, “The biggest lie in college admissions”
I just read it and wow, lots to process.
To summarize a few of (many!) points:
College essays can be bought even easier than test scores – no matter how much time and money is spent on test prep, the student still has to take the test alone.
Colleges don’t know and maybe don’t want to know how many good essay “fixers” there are out there. These services, like most other advantages in admissions, are available primarily to the wealthy and in-the-know.
There’s no proof that essays add to the admissions goals at selective schools, since alternatives aren’t being tried.
I know it is not good form, but see my post #67. It also makes the point that admissions has specifically avoided testing whether essays either correlate with later performance, are reproducible (different adcoms give same scores), or change the admissions decisions (by doing a subsample both with and without).
The reason is the whole drama helps elevate the process, and gives everyone an illusion of more control. Individuals submit their own essays, not just a test score, universities have whole admissions committees considering each application, and it all seems so much more fulfilling than just grades and test scores. A school that ditched essays would be seen as unserious and impersonal.
I know essays can knock you out of contention, have seen it. Just as there are attributes they actively seek, sending the wrong impression, things they don’t want to see, is a blow. And for top colleges, a long list of other kids to choose among.
The point of the essay is more about how an applicant thinks, if he’s thinking in the ways adcoms want to see. And atributes, qualities, energies. Not subsequent gpa.
Most bought essays are not written by people with admissions experience. And there are ways to see a lack of correlation between the essay and the quality of the rest of the package.
Wealthy parents doesn’t equate to savvy.
The whole point of the article is that colleges don’t know what they haven’t been catching
Yes, there are bad essay rewriters out there, but this is an industry insider saying she’s seen some really good ones, too.
The blog post cited in #113 is really, really good. One of the main points is the essay helpers wealthy, savvy (and yes, those two are related) parents hire are not random folks, but people with extensive experience in the college admissions industry - former adcoms themselves, etc. The blog writer specifically notes that. The idea you can’t find someone who can write like a tired, overworked adcom wishes a 17 year old would write is pretty silly.
My daughter wrote her own essays.
To my knowledge no one edited them…or even saw them. All I know is a few of the topics.
I don’t know whether to be happy or concerned…
Well, most apps have been submitted and it’s now out of our hands…phew.
Few adults know how a great essay reads. They know ordinary writing (no offense intended.) If they haven’t recently been in admissions, how could they?
And “how college essays typically sound” isn’t hot advice.