<p>Why essays play major role in college admissions when they can be written by applicant friend, family member, college advice firm or paid expert writer? </p>
<ol>
<li>Your friends and family probably can’t write that good of an essay.</li>
<li>Most people can’t afford to pay someone to write it for them, or are against it morally.</li>
<li>People can cheat on anything. People can cheat and get high grades, cheat and get high SAT scores, etc. The essay is a more subjective part of the application where cheating can be easier to detect (ex. high grades but a poorly-written essay). At the end of the day, cheating is inevitable and impossible to always find. Colleges know that, so they can only hope that the majority of people don’t cheat on their essays.</li>
</ol>
<p>Thanks for honest reply @pmmywest. Yes if some one wants to cheat they can do every where ! </p>
<p>It’s not just essays, everything can be faked. Try looking up stories about fraud for international applicants, for some countries, it’s estimated than at least 50% of the applications contain at least one major fraudulent document, including essays, transcripts, test scores, rec letters, EC lists - there is nothing that can’t be faked and in certain connected cities, they estimate the fraud may approach 90%. There’s a whole industry out there just writing fake applications to all the top schools. They don’t talk about it, but I suspect many of the top schools are very good at recognizing the fakes, as they probably all start to look the same. At the same time, because those students are full pay, I’m sure some schools in financial trouble look the other way and just take the money.</p>
<p>Yes I hope Colleges have means of identifying fake essays and reward genuine. Thank you for the reply </p>