Real Value of Essays

College Essays
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False

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Please provide proof of this claim. In my extensive experience, this is not true.

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At the high end of HS students, many are notably good writers. Better than a high proportion of adults can write. Full stop. To think that these students applying to highly rejectives aren’t writing their essays even if they are working with their HS counselor and/or a private counselor is ignorant. There are also significant free college essay writing resources that are accessible to all.

These top students are often applying to the small proportion of schools that care about essays. I am skeptical that an AO at any of these schools can tell whether someone else was involved in writing the essays
they don’t know the caliber of the student’s writing (which is not always reflected in their grades) nor do they know the student (so they can only guess what the student’s ‘voice’ is). One of my very best student writers was a B student with little rigor.

In some cases, having a teacher or parent get involved in the essays can actually make the essay worse. Lesser not only from the perspective of the student’s voice, but sometimes grammatically and structurally as well. I saw this many times when I was working as a college counselor
for example, English teachers (who often are NOT trained in how to write a common app personal statement) adding intros and conclusions to essays that contained 650 words, each one there for a reason, or parents editing in their voice (obvious to the counselor, but to an AO, likely not).

Many of the students I have worked with chose not to accept the changes the English teacher, counselor or parent recommended, nothing says even if one of these adults is involved that the student has to take the advice. Many relatively high academic students are confident in not accepting recommended essay changes made by adults.

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So we use a feederish HS with a dedicated college counseling staff that helps our students with essays, and also the English teachers and such will provide further help. They also actually work with parents to help us understand what to do and not do when it comes to essays.

One thing that is very, very clear in that process is that the student’s own voice is considered a precious thing, and we all need to be very careful not to take that away from them.

And that’s because our experienced college counselors know that is what these colleges want to see, and they can usually tell, or at least suspect, when they are not getting it.

Now, I can’t answer for what all the independent paid college counselors and such out there are doing. But if anything, I think one of the many advantages of going to a HS where you will be getting advice like this is that our kids end up with essays that are appropriately thoughtful and well-written and yet absolutely still their own work.

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Agreed. I needed to qualify that as a good number of students who apply to top/flagship universities. Maybe it’s dependent on the area and the demographics and affordability of parents in the area as well.

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Just going by the peer group of my kid and the market for the vast number of private counseling services. I may be completely wrong as my visibility into this and experience is highly limited.

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Just because a student uses a private counselor it does NOT mean they aren’t writing their own essay.

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As for free resources, again from the talk by Amherst’s dean of Admissions, he noted that there is somebody that goes by the name of the essay guy, or something like that. He noted that if they see pat phrases or general format suggested by this person(s) that immediately deep sixes your application. Now he may have said this to dissuade people from using the essay guy. Also he noted that other commonly used essay writers tend to have a tell as it were. AOs are very aware of what a 17/18 year old voice reads like. Yes, “many” people may use them but that does not mean they are effective.

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I think College Essay Guy actually has some great tips and exercises to help figure out that things that are important to you and brain storm ideas of what you may want to showcase on your essays.

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Do you have a link to the Amherst Dean saying not to use college essay guy? Assuming that’s the website you mean.

CEG has numerous excellent free resources which are superior to what some high school or private counselors use. And CEG’s resources are available to all students of all incomes. CEG is not known for using pat phrases, at all
the site doesn’t generate an essay, it gives students many brainstorming exercises and other tips to help them write essays, including sample essays (same as any number of colleges supply on their own websites eg, Hamilton, Tufts and JHU to take a few examples).

Again, I stand by what I said. I expect many of Amherst’s applicants are superior writers to the admissions staff. No offense.

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I agree that they can write at a “smart adult” level, but a college essay is not a writing contest any more than getting into college is a smart contest.

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Completely agree.

What I am trying to convey is that there is not one type of ‘voice of a 17/18 year old’ and if an essay isn’t written in said voice, AOs will know someone else (an adult) was involved in the writing of said essay. That’s the sentiment I don’t agree with.

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We almost agree. My point is that the writing in itself is not necessarily the give away that it is not a person’s own work.

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He was talking at my son’s school, so nothing in writing. I really don’t who or what the essay guy is. Just passing along what was told to us. Take it for what it is worth. I’m in absolute agreement with you about Amherst’s, and other comparable school’s, applicants ability to write. My kid is one of those applicants.

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My point about voice was what we were told by the Dean. Again take it for what it is.

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Thanks for all the replies and educating me on the essay broadly. As a related thought (not asnassertion or even an opinion) - how many essays do a AO read in a day on average during the Fall admission cycle? How many AOs do these Universities have that can really sit down and read the essays and give it enough time?
I am assuming these AOs are experts in the field and have years of experience doing this. I can’t imagine myself sitting and reading 10s or 100s of student essays daily for weeks.
Maybe AI can help the AO (at least for a first pass) :slight_smile:

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It varies but at higher volume colleges a commonly cited range is that the readers are doing something like 30-50 applications per day in the peak season, and then of course there could be even more essays per day depending on if they have supplements and how many. I note part of why apparently many colleges are going to some sort of initial review/fast-tracking process is so that the readers can spend more time per application on the applications that actually have a serious chance.

Like in any field, readers are going to have varying levels of experience. Some colleges use multiple reader systems where less experienced readers basically have their work reviewed by a more experienced officer before the application is sent to committee (which of course is made up of experienced officers). At Yale, the initial review is done by more experienced officers who presumably can more quickly categorize applications in terms of whether they are competitive or not.

Finally, as to AI, at least some colleges are definitely experimenting with it, and Dartmouth is apparently looking at using it to help with their version of a fast tracking system. I don’t know if that involves essays specifically, however.

I note probably the biggest single admissions challenge for selective colleges is figuring out how to normalize transcripts for comparative purposes, since the US has a complete lack of a standardized curriculum and evaluation system for secondary schools. Historically this has required a lot of work by experienced regional AOs using school reports, counselor letters, possibly internal tracking data, and so on. But I suspect–including because of what Dartmouth said–that this is the sort of thing where a Big Data/AI approach could really help.

So, my guess is AI at the initial stage is more about generating a preliminary academic rating than about evaluating the essays. If applications get past that initial academic screen and into the “slow track”, I suspect at least for now, it will still be mostly human readers evaluating essays and recommendations and such. But they will be able to spend more time per application/essay on the slow track thanks to the uncompetitive applications being fast tracked.

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“Dartmouth is apparently looking at using it to help with their version of a fast tracking system. I don’t know if that involves essays specifically”

The Dean from Dartmouth gave quite a bit of detail about this—they are currently using it, it uses 64 factors, it is only for the academic viability aspect— on episode 379 of the Your College Bound Kid podcast. Approx 1:15 in.

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Awesome, I had seen the first reference, not yet this.

From the transcript:

Q: So, you know, I have to ask, what, what data are we talking about here? Is this GPA testing?

A: So we, yeah, so we’re using academics. So we’re using 64 different combinations of academic data, depending on what’s available in a school. And we weight it accordingly. So, you know, things like the obvious things like is or gpa, is it weighted or not? Is is there a way of assessing the rigor of curriculum in the high school? Is there class rank? Is there testing? What kind? And the combinations of those elements around academic achievement give us a way of taking a big pool and starting to sort it and say, okay, let’s start at the top and work our way through it.

And as opposed to reading them one by one without any intentionality. And, you know, you may be reading the wrong ones first. And so we’ve, we’ve kind of, you asked a question about, you know, volume and how we’ve had to rethink the way we do our work. This is an example of that where we’ve had to pivot a little bit from the old fashioned way of starting and just documenting and reading everything to say, okay, let’s, let’s be clear at the beginning about where to begin.

Q: Do you take any institutional history into consideration? Like some schools, when they have a track record of a lot of students from a school, they’ve, you know. . . . In first year class from this school, any of that kind of stuff?

A: No. So we’re, we’re not doing anything historical. We are context comes into it. So we are adding contextual elements from the school. So when there’s profile data that we can plug into one of the logic trees to say X percent go to a four year college, here’s the mean SAT against the student submitted score. We’re taking pre-populated information and we’re putting it through an algorithm that helps us sort the pool upfront. And it saved us, this year was the first year we did it, it saved us about three weeks of work. . . . And let us get into the reading process much sooner than we were able to do in other years when we were manually going one by one through all those files with admission people doing it. And also it just made it less open to misinterpretation by various admission officers. We were, you know, the, the, an admission officer could override the algorithm, but that was rare.

Q: Did did you come up with the 64 criteria by like brainstorming as an admission office? . . . Was this the work of consultants that, you know, you outsourced? How did you contact with that?

A: No, we, no, we insourced it. This was our senior admission officers last summer, had a retreat and I had a working group that kind of plotted through it and said like, what is available to us on the secondary school report on a transcript and testing through the college board landscape, like what’s out there that we could glean from the documents submitted, populate our database, and then the logic tree kicks in and says, okay, you know, these elements are present. This is algorithm 27, whoop. And it came up with an academic assessment for us.

Q: As you network with other peers at other schools. How common is this Lee? How many, you know . . .

A: I think I’m a pioneer.

Q: Yeah. 'cause I am not hearing this. Yeah. So I’m like, I’m much out of the loop on this. I mean, I’m . . .

A: No, no, I, I was sharing this with some fellow deans recently and they were like, wow. And I, I just, you know, it was a giggle because I’m, I was a humanities student, but I, you know, the data is there for us to use if we can. And what, in this example I’m sharing is me trying to think creatively about what do I know, how can I have the technology we have help tee up the work, not do the work. This isn’t a chat GPT version of reading a file, but help prep it so that the admission officer can go in and more elegantly use the information that’s been submitted and spend time where we need to spend time.

Q: Well, anything that saves three weeks. Yeah. I have a feeling you’re gonna have some other schools reaching out to you and asking for some Tips.

A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Q: This is where you tell Dartmouth, Hey let, let me get some consulting money on the side.

A: Yeah. Really. Let’s do a, let’s do a patent. No, but it was, you know, all of it is, you know, none of it was invented. It’s all there in the secondary school report. It’s, you know, being able to just load it into your computer and have the power of technology help map it for us.

Q: I do think it’s important for us to let our listers know though, that you are not just making decisions off of this. You’re still doing a full holistic read with the human element. Bringing in aspects of nuance that cannot be captured by landscape or, you know, secondary.

A: No, we don’t do this school profiles. No, no, no. What I’m describing doesn’t touch an essay. Yeah. Or a recommendation or an interview. It’s, you know, it’s, it’s taking what was the first step in our reading process, which is the academic review and automating it to a degree that lets the admission officer then go in and say, okay, this has been calculated for me. Does it seem accurate? If not, why? Or, oh, there’s a new piece of information, I’m gonna plug it in. And the, it’s adaptive. So the score adjusted as we added new, you know, when we see Julia’s letter saying if we ranked, she would be number three. You can plug that in and that changes the algorithm.

Fascinating stuff. I agree that if this is working for Dartmouth it will likely quickly spread. But it is not (at least yet) dealing with things like essays and recommendations.

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Sounds like they are using this system to either assign an academic rating or to eliminate some applicants up front based on their academic profile.