<p>All of this matters only at selective schools, and they have the luxury of, say, two to ten times the number of qualified (whatever that means) applicants than they can admit. This means they don’t need bona fide proof that an essay seems phony; given two (or more) otherwise similar candidates, they don’t need to take a chance on the one whose essay exhibits much higher quality than the rest of the application.</p>
<p>In my opinion (and that is absolutely all it is)…</p>
<p>This is just not an issue. It shouldn’t be scary. Good writers don’t need to worry that they’re going to be punished, parents don’t need to push their kids to insert typos…these concerns just don’t follow logically (at least not at this point in time) from the content of the article. This is only newsworthy in the first place because the admissions process is getting so out of control. We won’t help the situation by letting “DDI” become one more unnecessary stressor.</p>
<p>Maybe my feelings are inappropriately laid-back, but I just can’t seem to get worked up over this. It seems like old (and commendable) news that just happens to have made a recent headline.</p>
<p>You are right- it shouldn’t be scary. Formulaic 25 minute essays are quite easy, and the graders aren’t expecting the same quality as you’d expect out of a paper that the student had weeks to work on. What MY son found scary (for lack of a better word- actually ‘intimidating’ is more like it) was the application essay. He knew that his, which was his completely, would be compared to those that had been inspired by adults, if not completely written by adults, other than the student. It was sort of like the feeling when he was back in 6th grade, and he went to science fair with his homespun project and Johnny brings in a gee-whiz gizmo built by the engineer father.</p>
<p>Do college adcoms know how, unfortunately, common it is for students to have a HUGE amount of help with their essays? You have brilliant student writers who sit down and completely write and edit their own brilliant work. You have decent student writers who do the same and turn in decent, but not brilliant, work. You have decent student writers whose parents or counselors brainstorm up original and brilliant themes, then help write the thing for them- turning what would normally be decent into brilliant. Then you have mediocre/poor writers who do the same, turning in brilliance as well. How can anyone possibly judge who did what themselves or use these essays to compare applicants? They have no idea if this level of work can be replicated in the college environment, and truth be told, many times it can’t.</p>
<p>My son would much rather have his SAT writing sample be used for admissions purposes- at least he wasn’t competing with someone’s daddy or mommy. </p>
<p>And it seems rather ludicrous that colleges complain about poor writing skills, but then use admissions essays that were written by ‘who-knows’ to decide who gets in. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that if you’re admitting large numbers of people who don’t write as well as their brilliant application essays suggest, then maybe you’re not really reading THEIR work. Hmmm. I guess they’ll just keep doing it the same old way, though, and keep scratching their heads.</p>
<p>Just as most teachers can tell in a minute that Johnny didn’t build his own gee-whiz gizmo, I believe that most experienced readers can tell when an essay doesn’t have a teenager’s “voice”. That’s different than the quality of the writing; you can have excellent teen writers, but the essay still generally has the sound of a teenager. Excellent adult writers write differently than excellent teen writers.</p>
<p>“Do college adcoms know how, unfortunately, common it is for students to have a HUGE amount of help with their essays?”</p>
<p>What evidence exists to support this contention? I’ve always thought it an urban legend, devised by someone whose essays didn’t achieve the desired result as justification for his or her perceived lack of success.</p>
<p>“Excellent adult writers write differently than excellent teen writers.”</p>
<p>If an adult is truly an “excellent” writer, I would think s/he could make her prose sound whatever age s/he choses. There are, after all, plenty of adults who write young adult fiction and the popularity of their work is due in large part to sounding authentic to teenage ears.</p>
<p>“Formulaic 25 minute essays are quite easy”</p>
<p>For some, not for others. Colleges that assign papers due in a week (and never “test” in a timed essay format) don’t care if a student can’t write quickly, and so won’t punish at admit time for not doing well on the timed SAT, as long as the main essay, grades and rigor of classes are in agreement. The DDI-smelling essay is the problem (who knows how prevalent) when it doesn’t match the rest of the application.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>If it is just an urban legend, then I guess the last four pages of this thread are largely irrelevant. If there is an acronym describing it, I suppose it must be something of an issue. It doesn’t seem like such a complicated problem that it can’t be solved somehow; after all (to use a hackneyed analogy), we sent man to the moon. My solution- using a proctored environment for writing the application essay- may not be the best, but surely there has got to be a better way. If it is a problem. Which it seems to be, if there is a “name” for it. But, maybe it’s not. In which case, why did this thread get four pages?</p>
<p>That’s unfair.</p>
<p>SAT only allows 20 minutes to write a 5 paragraph essay. Comparing to an application essay, which most kids spend several hours if not days writing and editing, is just absurd.</p>
<p>I question the overall intelligence of these prestigious schools. I originally believed a policy such as this could be proposed and enacted by a HS dropout.</p>
<p>seriously, this is ridiculous.</p>
<p>
Urban legend or not, if we know it, they know it. It’s been discussed many times on these boards and in the news. Admissions officers do not live in isolated underground bunkers with no communications, and fail to keep up with information that will help them do their jobs.</p>
<p>Given that they know it, I can almost guarantee that they take steps to help ferret the “helped” essays out.</p>
<p>
Well, I guess that depends on your definition of “plenty”. As far as I know, there are only a handful who can make it sound authentic. That’s why they are popular. And if a kid has the skills to convince Jodi Poucault to write her essay for her, then maybe that kid does deserve to get into college!</p>
<p>Do admissions counselors make mistakes? Sure. Do they sometimes take as a student’s work that written by a parent? Undoubtedly. Do they sometimes determine that an essay is written by an adult or improperly coached, even when it was written strictly by the student? Again, probably yes. Could 2 different readers come to different conclusions? Without question. They are humans, after all. However, I think the risks are being blown out of proportion. If there’s a 1% error rate on this particular question (not talking about all the other errors they could make, or whether they like the essay, or anything else - just an error of authorship attribution), it’s a lot, and I’d need to see some evidence to prove to me that it’s even that high.</p>
<p>But short of the “proctoring” for the writing of student essays, having the student hand the essay, with enough copies for all applications, to the proctor and the proctor signing each one and submitting them by snail mail to each college (fax wouldn’t do it either because you’d never be able to tell whether the signature was original), there is no solution. And even this “solution” is not one because not all proctors will be honest.</p>
<p>Another solution would be to scrap essays altogether. Then there’s no question of “help” at all. But then the student is reduced to statistics with no ability to show his/her personality. Better? I hardly think so.</p>
<p>So we’re left with only one solution: Stop worrying about it. Do what you believe is right, or expedient, or whatever, and let the chips fall where they may. Whether you trust the process or not, whether you believe that your kid will end up where your kid should be, doesn’t matter. Bottom line, you can worry about something you can’t change, or you can accept the flaws in the system, deal with them and move on.</p>
<p>
Come, now. We read threads on CC all the time about kids wanting help with their essays, parents asking questions about essays, parents describing who edited their children’s essays, etc. </p>
<p>I suspect it is insidious and omnipresent as grade inflation in high schools. I would expect it to be particularly so for certain socioeconomic brackets. And when parents pay bucks to a college admissions counselor, you had better believet that they will do anything to help their child’s chances…and that would include a heavily edited (ghostwritten?) college admissions essay.</p>
<p>With regard to post #44 (adcoms know a fake essay) I completely disagree.</p>
<p>Experience is overrated; especially when it’s never tested against the truth.</p>
<p>OK, maybe they don’t know; I’ll grant you that. But since it’s a situation I cannot change, I’m not going to worry about it. If you want to have someone else write the essay for your student, that’s your choice. I’m not going to worry about it. My d wrote her own, with some parental suggestions for editing. The final result was her own (she chose which suggestions to use and which to ignore), and her final school results were also good. Yes, it’s only one data point; however, I could worry about it or not. I chose not.</p>
<p>I would guess that an essay will be labeled DDI only when there is a stark disparity between the essay and the rest of the application. Kids who write incredible essays independently usually will have other evidence of strong writing skills.</p>
<p>I would also guess that adcoms assume that most essays had been read by 3-4 adults (the parents, an English teacher, and some random “know-it-all”). I doubt that it happens all that often that the essay “gets you in”. It is a part of a whole package, and is judged in that context.</p>
<p>There’s an interesting premise in this thread, which I find questionable: that adults do a better job than 12th graders at writing this type of essay. Most adults are not great writers. They tend to have learned to be functional writers in the necessary contexts within their lives, but that rarely involves the kind of personal expression that admissions essays entail. Most of us barely even write personal letters anymore.</p>
<p>I have been thought to be a pretty good writer since I was a teen, but my daughter is better and more thoughtful at it than I am, and she logged hundreds of hours on personal essays during middle school and high school. I can read her writing and say, “I’m not following this transition here,” or “Do you want to discuss Z as well as X and Y?” I can (and did) proofread for grammar and spelling. But I never could have come up with the structure and theme she chose for her college essays on my own. My other child is a much less elegant writer, but he has a strong sense of what he wants to say and how he wants to say it, and it’s rarely what his mother or I would have chosen. It would have taken a diabolically clever adult to produce anything like the essays they wrote, with all their quirks, occasional infelicities, solipcisms, and authentically half-baked maturity.</p>
<p>I also disagree somewhat with the idea that it would be useless to compare the SAT II writing sample with a college essay. Sure, time to think and editing make a lot of difference. But there are very few writers whose final drafts don’t bear a strong stylistic resemblance to their first drafts.</p>
<p>There’s also another data point available: If a kid is capable of writing perfect, polished short essays on a regular basis, I would expect that to feature prominently in his or her teacher recommendations. (I mentioned that my daughter is a sophisticated, stylish writer. I would be shocked if her English teacher’s recommendation hadn’t said something similar. And her transcript and resume screamed “Writer!”) If there’s a big gap between the essays and the student described by the transcript and recommendations, that’s got to be a red flag for further inquiry.</p>
<p>I hope – and trust – that admissions staff aren’t making snap judgments that essays have been ghost-written, though. It’s one thing to raise a question for further investigation, and quite another to reach a conclusion based on very little evidence. I was suspected of plagiarism in my first semester of college by a teacher who thought that my lack of knowledge of Greek made some insights about language in a paper on Sappho look questionable. I was able to satisfy him fairly easily by explaining my method (using multiple translations to develop hypotheses about nuance and ambiguity), and filling in a key fact (I had a crush on a total Greek jock and had used my questions about vocabulary as a chance to chat her up) and some background (I had a long history of writing with a confidence that my actual knowledge didn’t support – my 9th grade history teacher had once complained that I thought I was Toynbee).</p>
<p>Just had to jump in and thank Paying3tuitions for the tips on preparing for the essay portion of the SAT. My son is taking the SAT (right now!) and had procrastinated on writing out some sample essays (I got him to list some literary/historical examples he could use). </p>
<p>Then I saw your plan about throwing out prompts & having the student verbally use the examples – tying them into the question asked.</p>
<p>It worked wonderfully (we did about 20 prompts yesterday afternoon/evening!). I mean, the prep went wonderfully, son is on his own in the essay, but I think he got a good review of spitting out some analysis quickly & in an organized fashion.</p>
<p>Thanks for the last-minute help!</p>
<p>Unless an incredible disparity exists, low SAT’s, poor English teacher recommendation, low grades and then an incredible essay, how could adcoms second guess a DDI essay?</p>
<p>Do Teen writers really differ from that of Adult writers? I only wish I had the prose that of my son. Most of my writing is formulaic for work in the same old form of reports. But even in the best of circumstances, I just don’t have the same IQ or vocabulary as him.</p>
<p>The situation will never be put to rest. The SAT’s cannot either be compared for those who had substantial tutoring and coaching vs. the kid who picked up the Barron’s book the week before. There are kids who have improved by 200 points with coaching. That kind of score can readily make the difference between types of schools applied to and accepted by. And the SAT’s are counted as more important than that of the essays. (For the record, many adcoms from selective schools separate the the applications into 2 piles by SAT’s before anything else is even examined. If you get into the “good” pile, then the rest of your application is considered). So so much for worrying about the essays…</p>
<p>Essays are what got S1 his acceptances. They were great and I was amazed he could write so creatively and well, I never saw it at this level in his HS work. His GPA was barely okay, his test sores we decent, 1500 range (old SAT), his ECs okay, but those essays were inspired. I had written a short story many years earlier on the topic of the essay and had offers from major magazines to publish it if I would shorten it a little (never got around to it), but it was not nearly as good as his.</p>
<p>I haven’t read the whole thread so this may have been covered -
The DDI parents aren’t doing their kids any favors unless they plan to write every paper the student has to turn in for the next 4 years of college.</p>