<p>i stil haven't seen my Ds aps and she is a freshman in college...</p>
<p>my parents couldn't read English, let alone proofread or even write my essays. ;)</p>
<p>I did the clerical stuff and the financial aid forms online.</p>
<p>mtpaper - your account of your nephew does not reflect well on Northwestern or the law firm that hires him. Writing well is more than just a skill. It's thinking clearly, logically, constructing an argument and building the sentences, phrases, paragraphs that get it across. Not everyone can be a great writer but with a good education everyone can be a competent writer. It's really sad that your nephew has never been made to develop this in himself.</p>
<p>I do not believe mtpaper's nephew is a true representation of Northwestern LS grads. Otherwise, top firms would not keep going there to recruit and NU wouldn't have the sixth highest number of Supreme Court clerks on a per capita basis. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2007/01/supreme.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2007/01/supreme.html</a>
<a href="http://education.yahoo.com/college/essentials/school_rankings/law/best_career_prospects.html%5B/url%5D">http://education.yahoo.com/college/essentials/school_rankings/law/best_career_prospects.html</a>
<a href="http://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/PubArticl...=1126256708738%5B/url%5D">http://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/PubArticl...=1126256708738</a>
WHERE THE TOP 50 FIRMS HIRED FROM
Law school Associates hired in 2005 2004 J.D.s Percentage hired at top 50 firm
Columbia Law School 151 397 38%
Northwestern University School of Law 82 224 37%
University of Pennsylvania Law School 91 249 37%
University of Chicago Law School 69 191 36%
Stanford Law School 57 177 32%</p>
<p>My problem with the SAT and ACT essays as a comparative indicator of a student's writing ability isn't the 25-minute time limit. It is that the writing is done with pencil and paper. Our kids have been taught to write papers and essays on a computer. They regularly use word processing programs to move sentences and paragraphs around, write neatly and quickly, and check for spelling errors. </p>
<p>Writing an essay on an unfamiliar topic in 25 minutes is a completely different task for a kid using a pencil and paper versus using word processing. I don't know how those scores can be considered indicative of anything. My kid's handwriting is so terrible I am surprised anyone unfamiliar with it can read half the words he writes. It certainly couldn't be done in the three minutes they say they devote to reading each SAT or ACT essay.</p>
<p>my Ds school does the pen to paper essays in classes all the time for test, for SAT/ACT practice and for just smart teaching</p>
<p>Might be time to have kid improve his handwriting</p>
<p>mtpaper, I'm very surprised that someone told your nephew that it's okay if he doesn't write well because someone will do that for him after law school. If he's hired as an associate for a law firm, trust me, he WILL have to do his own writing!!</p>
<p>whatever4, it may be true that essays and papers are done on the computer, but at least at my d's high school, essay exams in classes such as history or English are always done with paper and pencil (or pen, I suppose), not with word processors. Even d's science classes had some short answer/short essay type questions on at least one exam per semester.</p>
<p>By the time a student takes the SATs, he or she should be sufficiently familiar with "paper & pencil essay exams" to pull it off. Or at least not be able to use the "I didn't have a word processor" excuse.</p>
<p>Wow, people like that really annoy me. I have to apply to all of these colleges by myself (my mom never went to college and doesn't know anything about the process) yet there is someone else, who is being compared to me, and his parents are doing all of the work for him.</p>
<p>But, if I were you, I wouldn't do anything other than tell the parent it is unethical and such.</p>
<p>StevenJPenny - did your mom buy you food, clothes, change your diapers? Parents do what they can for their children. Some of us do draw an ethical line in the sand when they need to start finding their own voice, their own unique talents. And please keep in mind that we are all products of the generations that went before us. That means some kids now on the brink of college admissions come from many, many generations of family that never even thought of selective school admissions. If their parents are trying to help by buying rolls of stamps and keeping track of deadlines, does that make them despicable? Disadvantage is more thant real time. It is accumulated. My D could talk about the fact that her grandfather entered the coal mines at 9 and taught himself to read. Or that her dad's father and and his father were hopeless alcoholics. We all have whinefests to tap into somewhere. Better to just be glad you're in this moment.</p>
<p>mtpaper - that was just a wonderful post. So much like what's happening in my house. D has lovely essays that everyone loves that she just can't get happy with. Went away, wrote something risky (with a diagram and a really uncomfortable scene) but so much her perspective. I think she'll use it because it just feels right. And with my blessing. And to some good folks on here who supported me on the beauty of brevity - just 300 words plus a visual. I do think college admissions -- no matter how bruatally competitive -- can bring a family closer in unexpected ways. I am marveling at my D's sense of self -- her courage to just be herself in a world run amok with how-to's.</p>
<p>From today's "Miss Manners":
[quote]
Teachers tell her that in the upper grades, they commonly receive homework that was obviously done by an adult. It makes them wonder why parents want to trust their children to educators who think those teachers too dumb to be able to tell the difference.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>mtpaper - as a former practicing attorney and now a headhunter for attorneys, I have never in over 20 years heard of anyone being hired to write for a young attorney. The young attorneys do much of the writing for the partners, however, but the partners have paid their dues in that regard. You mentioned someone did that for him at school, too? The only way I could imagine that is if he has an identified disability for which he required an accomodation of some sort. Some of my D's friends have told her that their mothers wrote their essays and others had counselors hired who may as well have written them. I love to write and would have enjoyed writing her essays, but I believe much too strongly in karma.</p>
<p>Perhaps I misunderstand what I heard from my nephew about NW and his law firm.</p>
<p>Ctmomof3 is innocent -- most parents are helping their kids in some way with applications. Where one draws the line really depends on ones ethics or lack of ethics. Filling out basic information on applications as a time saver is quite different from actually writing the essay, which I think most parents would say is very unethical. Personally, I am willing to do secretarial duty for an over-stressed child, but not willing to write essays. I will edit essays, but not revise them. I don't worry about what other people are doing. In the end, I have to live with myself and my choices as do my children.</p>
<p>as if college applications aren't stressful enough, it's crazy to think that some kids now have to compete with PARENTS writing essays.</p>
<p>kind of pathetic, if you ask me. if your kid can't write his own applications, then he shouldn't be doing that many in the first place.</p>
<p>after all, he can only end up at one school. it boggles my mind why people think they're "keeping their options open" by applying to 10+ schools. don't you think you're really just making the final decision that much more difficult?</p>
<p>i applied to 5, chose one, and don't miss or even think about the ones i didnt choose or apply to.</p>
<p>I think I finally found out why so many students need help with their college essays. I read Harvard grad(?) N. Portman's Parade article this Sunday. It was a sophomoric piece of writing which would merit no better than a B in a high school's honors English course. I find it difficult to comprehend why she did not learn decent, collegiate level writing skills during her college days.</p>
<p>Perhaps Portman is capable of more, but followed a basic rule of writing - gear it to the audience. It was Parade Magazine after all.</p>
<p>Originaloog:</p>
<p>I have no idea how well Natalie Portman did as a Harvard undergrad. But I believe the articles in Parade are the products of interviews in which the ghost writer strings together answers to questions without actually including the questions themselves. That's why so many of these articles follow the format of the Portman article. In other words, I suspect that Portman is only the nominal author of the article, though most of the words are probably her own. But I do not expect a learned disquisition on microfinance to emerge from a celebrity interview.</p>