<p>Colleges crack down on dishonest apps - and while they are at it, find a new way to use those SAT essays:</p>
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...Admissions officers say they have ways to identify heavy-handed parental editing, embellishments and outright lies. Tainted applications can be easy to spot because they lack "internal validity" -- a polished essay may raise eyebrows, for example, coming from a student with mediocre English grades. A simple Internet search can be used to spot-check athletic activities or scholastic honors. The latest innovation: downloadable SAT writing samples. Since the standardized test added a written component two years ago, colleges have been able to compare students' writing proficiency on their SAT essays -- more or less guaranteed to be their own work -- with the prose that accompanies their applications.</p>
<p>The pressure to create a memorable application is growing as admissions brochures trumpet the importance of factors such as leadership, writing ability and out-of-school activities. As a result, colleges have helped fan the perception that exotic pursuits and flawless essays are more important than ever. Lloyd Petersen, a former director of admissions at Yale and Vassar, says the crush of applications "forces people to do things that they wouldn't normally do."...
<p>If the admissions brochures are trumpeting the importance of this, then the adcoms have nobody to blame but themselves. The applicants and their parents are merely giving them what they asked for.</p>
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If the admissions brochures are trumpeting the importance of this, then the adcoms have nobody to blame but themselves. The applicants and their parents are merely giving them what they asked for.
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A fascinating philosophy! Honesty and a sense of ethics has no role in college admissions. If colleges say they want X,Y,and Z then it's the fault of the colleges if kids and their parents fabricate these things to gain admission.</p>
<p>I bet this philosophy can be applied in many more places than just college admissions. Here's a few examples...</p>
<p>If I go by a store window and like what I see, giving counterfeit money to the store is perfectly ok. The store has nobody to blame but themselves for getting phony money. The "purchaser" is merely giving them what they asked for.</p>
<p>If an employer advertises for someone holding particular skills, people should feel free to apply for the job listing exactly those skills on their resume. The employer has nobody but themselves to blame for the phony apps, the applicants are merely giving them what they asked for.</p>
<p>When a person wants to buy a house and doesn't have the income to qualify for the loan, no problem. Just fill in whatever numbers it takes to get the loan. The banks have nobody to blame but themselves. The applicants are merely giving them what they asked for.</p>
<p>Truly a wonderful philosophy of life! I bet we all can't wait to live in coureur's world :(</p>
<p>Would adcoms consider this situation lying on a college app. A top math and science student at D's school whose parents both work for a 2nd tier U (father - physics professor, mom ? lab manager ? dept) are also part owners of a Chinese restaurant. They claim to also work at this restaurant; which is used on apps as their place of employment. The family is very wealthy, so no need to send in financials.</p>
<p>I don't think SAT essays can be fairly compared to college application essays. I would hope application essays would be polished via multiple drafts, and colleges should expect this too. SAT essays are first drafts under stressful conditions. How can the two really be compared to prove whether or not they have the same author?</p>
<p>Doesn't that depend on what the meaning of "is" is?</p>
<p>Are the schools any more honest in their advertising brochures than these parents were? I saw hundreds of school brochures and every one of them made the place look diversity capitol of America. Go visit the campus and most of them are whiter than the Alaska tundra in Januart :-)</p>
<p>Read the brochures and oh sure everyone can afford to any of them because the finaid is so good - the the package arrives and all you have to do is open a vein.</p>
<p>I'm not advocating that people lie when they apply to schools but I also can't get worked up too much about it. The whole admissions process is an exercise in mendacity all the way around. </p>
<p>I mean should an applicant be totally honest and say I am only applying to your school because it is a total safety and I would rather go off and join the Foreign Legion then end up there? Does any school come out and say unless you are a 3 for 1 URM or you father intends to fund the new library don't bother sending in an application if your SATs are less than X or your gpa is less than Y?</p>
<p>"Every student who is admitted to a college or university is qualified to attend." So how should we modify this statement to meet the concerns of the ethics police? Are editing suggestions made by a student's senior year english teacher verboten? Hmm.</p>
<p>The reality here is that organizations get the behavior they reward. It's hard to have sympathy for a system that rejects one BWRK after the next because they're "boring" yet admits lesser applicants who recognize the game and behave accordingly. (I presume it's OK to describe "ethically challenged applicants" as "lesser", right?)</p>
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<p>A fascinating philosophy! Honesty and a sense of ethics has no role in college admissions. If colleges say they want X,Y,and Z then it's the fault of the colleges if kids and their parents fabricate these things to gain admission.<<</p>
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<p>Wait a minute. I didn't say anything about "fabricating" anything. What I'm saying is that if adcoms "trumpet the importance of factors such as leadership, writing ability and out-of-school activities," then parents will certainly push and/or the students will dive on their own into leadership positions and exotic out-of-school activities. And come application time a lot of work is going to be expended making sure that essay can sit up and sing.</p>
<p>It's an arms race that the schools themselves promote and then have the nerve to complain about. While I'm sure there are liars and cheaters in all human endeavors, you don't have to be either find yourself modifying what you do in order to give the schools what they are asking for. In many ways it's not really different from the Olympic figure skater who alters and polishes her performance, not to freely express her true inner artistry, but to provide "what the judges are looking for." Nothing dishonest about that. It's called playing the game in which you find yourself.</p>
<p>The quote about admissions essays is kind of an odd paragraph out if you read the whole WSJ article, which deals almost exclusively with blantant deceit. I found this part really surprising:</p>
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The nine-year-old site [turnitin.com] which screens more than 100,000 student papers a day, added an admissions-essay service in 2004. Over the last three years, Mr. Barrie says, the site has screened more than 27,000 admissions essays, and found 11% included at least one-quarter unoriginal material. Mr. Barrie says about two dozen schools now use the site to check admissions essays; none of the institutions would agree to be identified.
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<p>As far as college essays go, I think that adcoms are interested in them for what they reveal about students' personality, interests, and creatvity. The ones I've talk to about this sure don't believe that they can conclude much reliable from them about a student's writing ability. That's the value of seeing the SAT writing sample; it's far more representative of what the kid is going to hand in during his first couple of semesters than most college essays.</p>
<p>I'll say this. I've just finished the college app game for the last time with my youngest. Can you say "victory lap"? All three are engineering majors, math whizzes, and frankly, poor writers. I winced reading their essays, but only passed on light editing comments. There would be no question the writing was 99% theirs. They did fine, but all were rejected from their reaches, and I can't help wondering if they were helped or hurt by their essays. We'll never know. I know if I worked in admissions I would say I want to see the student's writing, but how could you avoid being more impressed by polished work?</p>
<p>eg1 and dt123: I would think that if a "too good to be true" or too sophisticated essay raises a red flag for an adcom then the use of the SAT essay to help find the student's unfiltered voice is an invaluable, and ingenious, resource - precisely because the SAT essay is a first-draft written under stressful conditions. When a student produces a personal statement, they shouldn't over-edit it to the point where their voice is lost since that is one of the major points of the exercise. Students are constantly reminded that personal essays should be polished - it is a final draft and therefore, at the very least, ought to be free of grammar and spelling mistakes. That is not the same as "over-polished". I would think that problems - and red flags - go up only in extreme cases. If a student is a brilliant writer or even above average- and the rest of the app substantiates that- then the personal statement ought to reflect that skill in its best light. An over-polished essay is just that - over done and most likely hits false notes that don't square with the rest of the app. Plagiarism is outright deceit. When it comes to EC padding and all the ways students feel the have to stretch the truth to "stand out" - well, either one has to be fully prepared to prove everything if you get audited or not play into the whole game and just do what you love and love what you do no matter how it looks on the app. Colleges have to send out a stronger signal on this one - like Marilee Jones of MIT.</p>
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...The growing number of Web sites devoted to the admissions industry has made it easier for students to plagiarize material and trade in misleading gossip. Ivyessays.com, a professional essay-editing service, also lets students buy packages of sample essays grouped by theme, question or school. The $12 "Harvard" package includes 10 essays and five short-answer samples tailored to the school's application. (Ivyessay.com's writing is meant to be used as a sample, says editor in chief Adrienne Dowhan.) On chat boards like collegeconfidential.com, topics range from "How to impress admissions committees with your extracurriculars" to "Should I tell them that I'm Jewish?"</p>
<p>Bari Norman, an independent college counselor based in New York and Miami, says she occasionally sees parents tacitly encourage their children to stretch the truth on applications. The most troubling cases, she says, involve students who feel they're at a disadvantage because they're not lying...
<p>My youngest d is capable of writing an excellent essay, but pretty much only after 2 drafts, AND only when the topic engages her. She plans to take a couple of weeks this summer to work on her application essays, and I know that what she ends up with will bear very little resemblance to what she started with. She needs time to write in her own voice. She managed only a mediocre essay score on her first SAT (8), but she was THRILLED with it (and knowing what she could have produced in 25 minutes, so was I :) ).</p>
<p>Some colleges ask for a graded piece of work from the student's high school. Though I realize that these can also be heavily edited or even, in extreme cases, written by someone else, I can't help thinking that these are more representative of the student's actual writing ability. I would hope that colleges would weigh carefully the different circumstances under which SAT essays and admissions essays are written before concluding that discrepancies necessarily imply dishonesty.</p>
<p>Graded essays at school are often VERY heavily edited.</p>
<p>The writing under pressure may not be fair to some kids, but it is a reflection of ability, since good writers typicaly rise to the challenge of the time frame in a way that poor writers cannot.</p>
<p>I believe that most good students can be taught to write well under pressure, just as they can be taught to speak to large audiences and differentiate an equations with fractional exponents. Unfortunately very few adults are comfortable doing these three things. I agree that the essay CAN provide valuable insight into a prospective student's voice, but the fact of the matter is that voice is hard to evaluate whereas form is relatively easy. ("TWELVE o'clock. Along the reaches of the street Held in a lunar synthesis, Whispering lunar incantations Dissolve the floors of memory And all its clear relations," Note to Committee: Recommend reject. Worst sentence structure I've seen in ten years. And what's this gibberish 'Held in a lunar synthesis?')</p>
<p>PS, I also believe that any applicant who plagarizes an essay should be automatically rejected. But that still leaves LOTS of room between raw expression and the overpolished.</p>
<p>Shakespeare and now T.S. Eliot bites the dust. Not so surprising after all, competition is so fierce these days.</p>
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I also believe that any applicant who plagarizes an essay should be automatically rejected. But that still leaves LOTS of room between raw expression and the overpolished.
<p>With "holistic" admissions this kind of policing is absolutely necessary. Without it a HYPS degree would become a certificate of pathological dishonesty. This is especially true given the single digit acceptance rates. Any selection process in which subjective, easily falsified or plagiarized information plays a significant role will tend to systematically select the most dishonest. To illustrate, imagine that all candidates are equal and 90% are honest. With a 10% admissions rate the ad coms, without policing, would select a class made entirely from the dishonest 10%.</p>
<p>I agree with Curious14 here. The problem is not the essay in and of itself. It's the bland writing prompts and the grading rubrics. The "excellent essays" publicized by the CB were appallingly written and full of pablum. I'd rather read the telegraphic writing posted by NewHope. I gather many adcoms would, too, which is why they's reholding off on using the new essay in making their decisions.</p>