If the specific program encourages input from as many people as possible, it’s fine for a parent to offer input. College courses do not typically encourage such when it comes to writing papers.
Congrats to you daughter, @uskoolfish. Do you think there is difference between something like a big make or break scholarship program, though, and a run of the mill college class paper? I do.
I proofread my kids’ common apps and resumes and applications for merit scholarships but not classwork nor cover letters for jobs etc.
There is a difference in weight in my mind between a $145K scholarship and a mediocre grade on one assignment.
@1or2Musicians Yes, of course there’s a difference between the two-- but only up to a point. Because this level of assistance was to gain admission to a school. And trust me, admissions took a very active role in the grooming process.
My son’s high school had what I think (after three kids in three different schools) was a truly amazing, incredibly effective writing program. He came into high school with poor writing skills and left it a truly excellent writer. He will still ask the occasional question (we had a family chat with him, me (I have done professional editing in my career), one sister who is an English/Language Arts teacher, and the other who was the Graduate Assistant for Undergraduate Research at a national university for a couple of years. Between the bunch of us, we couldn’t come up with a sure answer to a citation question he had on a paper. Ultimately, neither could his professor, who said “use your judgment, but remember that clarity is always better with citations.” My son will definitely remember that example because he did receive full credit for the judgment he ultimately made.
One daughter’s master’s thesis was 70+ pages of discussion of a very obscure piece of medieval weaponry. To say it was boring is a staggering understatement. When I did the last read, I told my husband I wanted to rip my face off. There is nobody in this world, no person at a writing center, no TA, no professor, who would have given that paper a final read before submission, other than her mother. Therefore, I did it. Still not sorry.
I’m curious about the distinction between resumes and cover letters for jobs. They seem similar to me.
I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have someone proofread resumes and job cover letters. I’ve done it for friends who are partners at big name law firms, as well as two federal judges. There’s no writing center for that, and no question of ethics with regard to grades.
@doschicos I stay out of the editing process unless I’m asked for my advice. But if I’m asked, I basically turn it back to them to do any re-writing. I comment and point out areas that need clarification or details. I’ll indicate when something is phrased awkwardly. I believe there is a learning continuim–building blocks and practice necessary to develop into a better writer. So yes, I helped them in lower grades with simpler writing tasks and will continue to help when asked today on both smaller tasks and higher stakes essays.
Parents hire me to tutor their children at all grade levels. I offer my own children free tutoring and more flexible hours. And I do encourage them to go to writing centers and meet with professors first.
@zoosermom 1) Because they haven’t asked me to look over their cover letters for one thing 
and 2) because if they mess up with a typo on a cover letter, there are other jobs to apply for. For the resume, it’s going out to a lot of folks, 3) I think they have confidence in writing an email cover letter as they’ve had plenty of practice with letters over the years. Resumes, not so much.
I guess that’s how I would characterize why the distinction in how it applies to my family’s practice of using parental editing.
Well that’s certainly a good reason!
My daughters have both asked me to look over cover letters. I don’t write or comment on the actual content, but I do make sure there aren’t any typos or silly mistakes.
My younger daughter has been paid for her writing since she was 13, and has had the benefit of professional editing along the way, as well as being a writing tutor in college. She doesn’t need my help with content, style, grammar or spelling, just fresh eyes in case there’s something she doesn’t see. I also don’t understand the vast majority of what she writes anyway!
As a teacher of college composition, I must do some editing here.
" Dear (posters): In a number of instances, the thread is falling into the slippery slope fallacy. When someone says “I do X” the reader cannot assume that it means “I do X, plus Y, plus Z.” So as you revise your thoughts, please keep this in mind.
Also, I note some straw man and judgmental language. In addition, following what we have learned from studying Toulmin argument, please be sure there are warrants and evidence for all claims.
Overall, avoid hasty generalization, especially how one school’s particular rules may or may not be applicable in other cases.
Good luck revising!"
For those that will continue editing, I think @dfbdfb has pointed the way: Have the student inform the professor that it will be edited by the parents. Having explicit permission will cover his/her butt.
@doschicos because your basic premise that any writer “does it by themselves” is wrong. All writers, pros, students, me, can use an editor’s eye. It’s just how our brain works - and why there are thousands of folks working as editors out there. In fact, most every teacher and TA your kid has will have someone, peer or professional, look over their “publish or perish” submissions.
Now, some teachers prefer to see raw material, unaided and unedited. They can ask or requre that. But I don’t know a single professional involved in written communication for a living who does not avail themselves of a proof-reader, editor or at least “peer review” when time allows. Why else would a university have a resource room in the first place?
But I think there is a fundamental split here - about the writing process, the purpose of papers and perhaps college in general. Is a college paper a “go sit in a room and let’s see what you have in your brain” exercise or is it a “here’s a topic, go use whatever resources you can find to delve as deeply into it as possible?”
If the idea of the paper is simply a device to assess/test/grade a student’s ability to construct an arguments, creative work, analysis on their own without outside input, then that is one thing.
But if the idea is for a student to go out, use the resources at their disposal to delve as deeply as they can into a subject or idea, and perhaps come up with insights and ideas they might not have come to as fully on their own, then conversations with friends, TAs, parents, roommates are all, I would think, excellent ways to continue that discussion.
Sure, in a perfect world your kid is wrapped in a toga and walking the rocky shore with his learned professor, investigating the subtle intricacies of Homer’s meter. But most likely, they had a 45 minute lecuture, read the text book and are sweating the paper that’s due.
Of course, if a parent is willing to pay whatever they are paying for college AND are willing to write a kid’s paper for them, it’s a silly situation - mostly for the parent and kid (not to mention dishonest). But the idea that a parent might have not have an interesting perspective, suggestions for investigation, or might not catch a dangling modifier that could confuse the reader - all to good effect - baffles me. Learning comes from input from others with different opinions and perspectives. Just cause the “other” is a parent doesn’t invalidate the input.
@CaliDad2020 You got my premise wrong. My premise is using resources provided at the college for academic assignments for academic and personal growth. Not parents.
“not catch a dangling modifier that could confuse the reader”
my guess is most profs won’t worry about such things if the thesis and support are there and adequately presented.
And if the prof does care about the grammar, perhaps being dinged for it may sear it deeper into the brain than mom circling it for revision.
I have a kid who really is teflon coated when it comes to grammar concepts. This semester an anthro instructor is marking off for grammar despite compliments on her academic content. She is now motivated to work on this and has the weekly sessions at the writing center. She has to want to improve; I would be doing her a disservice by smoothing her way.
I definitely reviewed college papers when asked. Of three kids, only one asked, and with her, only a few times. The beauty of editing for a college class is that it can only be editing - I knew absolutely nothing about So and So’s Theory of Management or whatever the topic was, so there was no way I could revise the content. It was strictly “revise the run-on sentence”, “this sentence doesn’t make sense” “you have a paragraph with only 2 sentences”, etc.
Before I looked at any papers from my kids (and only younger one ever showed one to me) I looked up Tuft’s policies. At the time they had some wording that they encouraged you to have someone look over papers before handing them in. I thought they made it pretty clear what was going over the line in terms of help. Evidently they must have decided there were too many helicopters out there, because they now are quite clear, that they only want students to go to the Writing Center, for the reasons that have been enumerated by others on this thread - they are trained to know just how much help to give. My son did go to the Writing Center a few times, but as a chronic procrastinator, it was often too late. (Too late for us too, I’m not up at 2 in the morning either!) One way or another he turned into a pretty good writer.
And yes, the quality of writing instruction at the average high school is pretty abysmal. When I was at a small private school in English we wrote a 5 to 7 page paper that was due every Monday, all year long and it got heavily marked up. My kids never got that quantity or quality of instruction.
Moving this out of hypotheticals for me: My D17 applied for an honors program this past application cycle. As part of it, she had to sign a statement averring that she had received no assistance from anyone else in crafting the contents of her application packet.
So: For those who believe that it’s fine for parents to review their college children’s work, would it have been ethical for me to (lightly!—I’m not talking rewrites, or even structural suggestions here) suggest edits on my daughter’s essays? If it matters, there was a decent amount of potential scholarship money attached, so her success or failure at that application had the potential to directly affect my life, too.
A friend jokes that his wife has taken freshman English five times. Her husband and her son are both engineers complete with the stereotypical language deficits. Her help, I am sure, was way over the boundary.
I am not certain that providing help when asked in any way infantilizes our kids. I helped S2 with polar coordinates for Calc and it did not change him or our relationship one bit. Different story if I insist he show me all his work.
I received the same heavy mark-ups at a large public school, bursting with the peak of the baby boomers.
I had quite the exchange with D’s junior year AP English & Comp teacher, who didn’t mark up papers at all. He graded them with the same numbers used in the AP exam, arguing that (a) the AP exam doesn’t give markups, and (b) students ignore markups. They certainly don’t ignore the markup when they are required to re-write the paper.
My kids all attended the same “excellent suburban public high school” and they would come home with 98s on papers that I thought were poorly written.
Some colleges have career centers with folks who help polish resumes and cover letters if asked.
D’s school had a specific internship program open ONLY to those who completed a series of workshops (resume, interview etc) and had their resumes approved, after however many back and forths with the career center it took. I think D went back and forth 3 times with hers.
She did ask me to look at it after that, and I did suggest an addition based on a job I recalled she did that she did not (or rather, she didn’t think it relevant and I pointed out why it might be).
@dfbdfb my kids have had situations like that. In those cases I am completely hands off. But that’s different, I think. Most college kids are having others read their papers, discuss their ideas with them etc. I always thought that was kind of the point.
I’ll give the only real experience I’ve had with my kid in university. First paper in college so they were a bit nervous. Early draft. Obviously was one of those writing courses where the thesis was selected as part of the assignment early, then much of the research was done. Thesis was good. Research was thorough. Body of the paper was decently laid out - but veered badly off the thesis (it was clear that not enough deep research had been done before selecting thesis.) I told my kid: cut and paste your thesis sentence/paragraph to the top of each page or write it on an index card and keep it next to your computer at all time. Make sure every sentence is pointing back at that. Here is where you seem to have followed your source material and not your thesis. Here is where you seem on track. Did that cross a line? (And I suggested some grammar adjustments.)
I come from a family of Profs. I know how little time they are able to spend on many of their student papers. I just can’t imagine that thoughtful, constructive input hurts a student. But, as I mentioned, my kid avoids having me look at their stuff cause I tend to make them do too much more work.