<p>Hunt: one other thought – the file readers are humans and look for reasons to justify their positive feelings about any particular candidate. Compelling thoughts and stories conveyed in essays or teacher recs are really the prime source of these, no? I don’t think we should downplay the importance of these given the process that Yale and others use to winnow down the pile.</p>
<p>I guess I don’t know whether I should be skeptical about whether the file readers really do give serious consideration to essays, or whether I should be skeptical about whether they *should *do so.</p>
<p>I do offer the caveat that I can easily imagine an essay helping a person if it reveals a piece of information about the student that doesn’t come through elsewhere in the application. I just don’t see why a sparklingly written essay should make a different by itself.</p>
<p>Jeepers, Hunt. It’s because people aren’t bundles of information.</p>
<p>My thinking is that given all the contents of the application file – what is in there (besides a note from the Athletics dept or the Development office) that will really make any single applicant stand out? We know what the typical viable student has: top marks in a rigorous transcript, some good/great ECs, test scores, generally supportive teacher recs. Besides fishing for gold in the rec letters, upon what else besides the student statements is there to base any yea/nay decision?</p>
<p>Certainly what I’m describing is imperfect – but what else do we have?</p>
<p>You could go by which applicant has the most stylish clothes at the interview. To me, that’s pretty similar to judging by how well-written the essay is. (I realize I’m in a curmudgeonly minority on this point.)</p>
<p>Hunt, I think the problem is far, far less prevalent than you think it is. </p>
<p>First of all, it’s incredibly difficult for an adult to adopt an 18-year-old’s voice. Sure, some writers can do it convincingly, but how many of them are writing someone’s college essays? And how many convincingly different essays can one person write per season?</p>
<p>Second, not that many adults can write at a level that would be impressive to one of the highly selective colleges that really relies on the essays. Adults, too, are way more cautious than 12th graders. I suspect that adults, on balance, tend to make the essays worse, not better.</p>
<p>Third, the SAT writing test serves as a kind of reality check. If a kid whose essay scored 8 on the writing test submits a beautifully written, conventional 5-paragraph exposition as a college essay, I’ll bet alarm bells go off and someone DOES check the style and organization of the SAT essay.</p>
<p>Fourth, and probably most importantly, the kind of kids who compile the records and recommendations to make them strong enough Yale (or wherever) applicants for the essay to be important mostly aren’t the kind of kids who are letting their parents, teacher, or tutors take over for them. I don’t know what your experience was, but my kids were not at all welcoming of editorial suggestions beyond copy editing, both because they felt strongly they knew what they wanted to say, and because they believed it would be morally wrong to let someone else write even a sentence for them. Of course, those kinds of scruples can’t be universal, but I’ll bet they are very common among the kids whose essays are actually going to matter. (Which maybe excludes some recruited athletes and developmental admits.)</p>
<p>Do kids’ spelling, syntax, and grammar get buffed up by helpers? Sure. But the personal essays aren’t supposed to be spelling, syntax, and grammar tests. And that’s real-world, too. Out here in the real world, as wjb said, even great writers have editors (and in many cases administrative assistants), and there’s hardly a business memo in existence that didn’t get at least a set of extra eyes on it before it became final.</p>
<p>Of course, I can’t prove that a handful of kids don’t get away with plagiarized (or improperly assisted) college essays every year. I bet some people do. But I think it really is a handful, not a significant number of applicants in whatever the final group is.</p>
<p>I may just be quibbling, I suppose–I think what I think is “information” in the essay includes points about character, interests, etc.</p>
<p>
Could be. My kid did get an 8 on the SAT essay–I thought his application essay was pretty good. He wrote it himself, although he did take comments from several adults.</p>
<p>The essay can communicate information about character, I guess, but I think it’s rare for essays to communicate interests, etc., that aren’t apparent from the rest of the application. College admissions people work awfully hard to discourage kids from writing essays that are like narrative resumes. If you have ever read a bunch of those in a row, you know how utterly ineffective they are.</p>
<p>What essays CAN communicate is two big classes of things: how a kid writes, which on its own is important information for colleges, and how a kid thinks and looks at the world, wholly apart from what’s on his resume. Is he funny, serious, pretentious, humble, sophisticated, straightforward, poetic, systematic? That’s information, but it’s not resume information or tick-box information. It’s the sort of information, though, that lets a college admit people, not numerical scores.</p>