<p>During the craziness of the '08 application season (I’m a tutor), my eighth graders made a plan to write fake application essays after they were done with all the real ones. The only rules were that the fake application answers should be outrageous enough to get a student’s essay sent straight to the trash and that there should preferably be at least an element of truth in them, however small, either or you about the school (probably not both). Basically, they are supposed to be the application essays that your evil twin would write. </p>
<p>Joking about our evil twin essays was very cathartic in November, while we were all stressed out enough to go bonkers (I was applying to Ph.D. programs too), and now the students are actually writing the essays. It’s been such fun that I thought I would start a thread and see if anybody on CC wanted to play along. My favorite of the morning was a student who had applied to St. Paul’s and who had to write about a “crusade” that she would undertake as part of her St. Paul’s experience. She began her evil twin essay to St. Paul’s with something like this: “St. Paul’s has had a reputation for academic rigor for a long time. If I am accepted to St. Paul’s, my crusade will be to change all that.”</p>
<p>Anyway, I highly recommend it as a capstone activity and something to look forward to while you are writing millions and millions and millions of essays. If anybody has any funny ideas, please post them here so that we can continue laughing!</p>
<p>My son and I had a blast coming up with the most inappropriate answers to short answer questions…just the most horrible thing anyone could possibly say. For instance, "What makes you laugh out loud? “abject poverty, amputees and other people’s ignorance.”</p>
<p>O yeah…and for “special talents” he thought it would be funny to put telekinesis. </p>
<p>I remember filling out a PTA form that asked if I had any special talents that I could share with my child’s class. I wanted to put “pole dancing” so bad, (as a JOKE, of course) but my husband reminded me that most of the other moms had no sense of humor.</p>
<p>This actually happened during parent applications… My dad was just getting fed up with the same questions for every school. Always asking about very broad topics and he put very small concise answers… He started mocking them outloud.
“What type of person do you want your son to be after graduation?..Holy ****, if you actually graduates I don’t care. It would be nice if you become richer than God and look like Carry Grant. Just remember to pay us back when we are old and feeble.”</p>
<p>We didn’t send this… But it was a nice little thought.</p>
<p>Niiice. Another one from a student of mine today, in response to the “Please write your own question and answer it” prompt: “If you were a dictator, what kind of dictator would you be? How would you rule your evil empire? For instance, do you see yourself relying more on military or educational tactics to oppress your citizens?”</p>