<p>AND the last time we heard from her she was still making excuses.</p>
<p>She still hasn’t owned up to her mistake.</p>
<p>And by the way, lefthanddog --is she a young student or one of the most highly paid authors in the world, based on her contract? I expect one of the most highly paid authors in the world to submit her own creative work. I expect an intern who receives no pay to be monitored. In fact, this level of plaigiarism does not even require a junior high school degree to recognize as wrong. There is only one explanation for this: dishonesty. Ignorance is not an explanation. And certainly given the way these outtakes are clustered, “unconscious” recreation is not believable either.</p>
<p>It seems the elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about is the possibility that the girl didn’t plagiarize, but rather the plagiarism was committed by her ghostwriters at 17st productions.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The poster cloverdale7 has already expressed the opinion that that is not to be supposed (as I agree), and noted the legal fact that that is not relevant, because Ms. Viswanathan’s contract surely warranted that SHE would submit a manuscript free of copyright infringement. If she was letting a “packager” do actual ghost-writing, she was responsible for checking the ghost-writing. There were certainly several shady cooks spoiling this broth, but by contract she is the most responsible one. She has no one to sue in this instance, but her publishers, besides recovering the advance on royalties they gave her, have several possibilities for suing her to recover additional damages.</p>
<p>It may depend on who suggested that she team up with Alloy; Alloy, I believe, holds copyrights, rather than KV. If it is the publisher (via the editor), the responsibility maybe diffused. As well, it is not clear to me whether KV had read the plagiarized works on her own or whether some had been suggested to her as models to emulate. Not that it absolves her of responsibility, but whoever suggested it should have checked that emulation did not become outright copying.</p>
<p>Alloy/17st jointly holds the copyright with KV.</p>
<p>See the Harvard Independent kaavyagate section </p>
<p><a href=“http://www.harvardindependent.com/ViewArticle.aspx?ArticleID=9940[/url]”>http://www.harvardindependent.com/ViewArticle.aspx?ArticleID=9940</a> </p>
<p>for a link to an interesting article on IvyWise, the college-application “help” service promoted by Katherine Cohen. </p>
<p><a href=“http://www.harvardindependent.com/ViewArticle.aspx?ArticleID=9962[/url]”>http://www.harvardindependent.com/ViewArticle.aspx?ArticleID=9962</a></p>
<p>Thanks for the links, Tokenadult. As one Harvard student stands accused of plagiarism and even bad writing, some of her schoolmates–the Harvard Crimson and Harvard Independent writers–show another side of Harvard students: they can do research and they can write!</p>
<p>I do not buy that a ghostwriter was involved --where did this come from? It’s another conspiracy theory. To the degree that responsibility goes around, since the book is being pulled everyone is taking a hit. But this egregious act was done by this writer.</p>
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<p>It was my impression that 17th Street Productions uses ghostwriters to help get a book into shape and that she needed and received a lot of help.</p>
<p>Heard that the VP and publisher at Little Brown is being replaced and is moving to London to start a new packaging business. (I don’t have a link to official article yet.)</p>
<p>Well write …do you think one of their established ghost writers did this for the first time, right now?</p>
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<p>A ghostwriter or editor would not have anything to gain by ever doing this–on this book or any other.</p>
<p>I agree. </p>
<p>And presumably, they would also know better. </p>
<p>I still do not see how the responsibility defers to people who obviously were not familiar with these other works --or would have intervened. When I edit something no one expects me to be familiar with everything else ever written by anyone --or even with all major and minor works within my own field. </p>
<p>On the other hand, I do expect my writers not to steal.</p>
<p>If a ghost writer was involved, then it is possible that the ONLY thing of great worth produced by the Harvard student, in her packager’s eyes, were the passages from the other writers. Although these passages were better in the original versions, and in changing them she made them worse, they were still pretty good --and might have boded well for future talent in her packager’s eyes.</p>
<p>From my first post in this thread:</p>
<p>“We read the accolades and the references to Katherine Cohen’s high powered -and high priced- jockeying. I am wondering how long it will take the Franck Eggelhoffer of admissions to delete the references!”</p>
<p>Eight days that must have felt like a lifetime as this runaway train approached its final stop. I would love to be a fly on the wall when Mrs. and Mrs. Wealthy I. Bankers drive from Rye to visit Cohen and start a conversation with, “Well, we have spent $35,000 in the last 3 years. How do you plan to bury the skeletons and avoid another Kaavya?” </p>
<p>Why do I believe that the answer might be the super platinum package starting at $75,000 that consists of 2 year full immersion in an inner-city school, a fully localized application, and the official name change to the most “in” ethnic sounding surname, or even better a powerful cocktail such as Juanita K’visha Whitehorse.</p>
<p>While this is not on the topic of Kaavya’s plagiarism, I just read the article linked above regarding Ms Cohen’s services. While this might sound odd coming from me, as I work as a college counselor, I am still awestruck at the “services” she provides and the fees. I’m also laughing a bit at some details in the article. It mentions how she orchestrates the plans for each client’s summers, etc. She advises no summer camp or teen tours of Europe. Oops, my kids went to summer camps in their interest areas. Oops, one of my kids did a teen tour of the US and also a teen tennis tour of Europe. Why? Cause they WANTED to. There was no big plan with college in mind at all. Ms. Cohen arranges and networks for internships. My kid just looked up and wrote letters to local architects (her area of interest) because she wanted to do an internship and see what the field was like as she was considering it as a possible college major and if she liked it, would keep that as one of her college criterias (availability of this major). I could go on but my point is, my kids did things they wanted to do, not things to get into college. There was no “big plan”. They were just who they are and that was documented on their applications. And hey, they didn’t go to a private school or well regarded public or choose any activities to booster their “package”. </p>
<p>While I do counsel students applying to college, I basically offer my expertise in the process and guide them in the way that any very well equipped and knowledgeable parent could likely also do. I don’t create certain kinds of students. I just take whoever they are and help them choose appropriate colleges and then present who they are to the colleges. What I am reading is that Ms. Cohen also helps create who these kids are according to some master plan that is the “ideal” candidate. Well, how does she account for kids like mine who had nothing orchestrated and just are who they are…(not just talking my kids only but many on this forum too)…and they still get into these selective schools! It is one thing to advise students in college selections and also to guide them through the admissions process. It is another to “create” candidates. And frankly, plenty of kids get in who just pursued their interests and desires and didn’t think about which choices colleges might like but only what choices they wanted to make. So what if they go to camp! So what if they take a travel trip for youth! And do they need the high powered internship that most would see through and realize that someone knew someone which got them the internship in the first place rather than on their own? Lots of kids get into the top schools in the land without someone making them into a candidate. They just ARE a candidate by the nature of who they are. If someone guides them when the time comes to select colleges or to undertake the application process, that is one thing (all kids benefit from that…some have parents who do this, some hire others to be the guide, some have effective counselors at school). In my view, students should choose to be who they want, not what someone else tells them they gotta do to get into a good college. Those who don’t follow Ms. Cohen’s do’s and don’ts manage to get in, so her clients could too without someone sculpting their image and life.</p>
<p>soozievt</p>
<p>this is ivywise’s admission and matriculation list. WHY would anyone pay a dime to get a kid into some of these schools. Can you imagine paying her fee for admission to Boston University – six of her kids matriculated there. What they couldn’t do that without her help? Five to GW! Do you think these families hired her for THAT?</p>
<p>And by the way, every asterisk is an actual student so multiply these by the fee for her income over those two years. These people who pay this fee certainly have money to burn.</p>
<p>This is a partial list of schools where IvyWise students have been admitted in the past two years. The selectivity of these schools ranges from less than 10% to 60% admissions rate.
- Represents number of students attending, Fall 2004 & Fall 2005</p>
<p>Barnard College * *
Berklee College of Music
Boston College * * * *
Boston University * * * * * *
Brandeis University * *
Brown University * * * *
Bucknell University * * *
Carnegie Mellon University * *
Columbia University * * * * *
Colgate University * * *
Cornell University * * * *
Dartmouth College * *
Duke University * * *
Emory University * * *
Fordham University * *
Georgetown University * * *
Georgetown, Business School
George Washington University * * * * *
Harvard University * * * *
Johns Hopkins University * *
Kenyon College
Lehigh University
Middlebury College
Muhlenberg College * *
New York University
Northwestern University * * *
New York University * * * * * * *
NYU-Tisch School of the Arts
Oxford University
Princeton University * * *
Skidmore College * * *
Southern Methodist University
Stanford University * * * *
Swarthmore College * *
Tufts University * *
Union College * * *
University of Arizona
University of California-Berkeley * *
University of California- Los Angeles * * *
University of California- San Diego
University of Chicago * *
University of Denver
University of Miami
University of Michigan * * * *
University of Pennsylvania * * * * * * *
University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School of Business
University of San Francisco
University of Southern California * * * * * * *
University of Wisconsin * * *
Vassar College
Wake Forest University
Washington University-St. Louis * * * *
Washington & Lee University
Wesleyan University
Yale University * *</p>
<p>My personal favorite, from the IvyWise site, is the description of services for her, ummm, less mature clients:</p>
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</p>
<p>Can you imagine the kind of people who have nothing else going on in life but to strategize this crap from before nursery school. Talk about Stepford…</p>
<p>Ms Cohen sounds like she’d be good fodder for a “60 Minutes” piece.</p>
<p>There are people who need help to get into BU and GWU, and parents who can afford it. (No one on this website, of course). I am also not yet convinced that Kaavya intentionally copied. It may still be an osmosis kind of thing. If she sat there flipping through the novels looking for “ideas”- no excuses. But did she? I hope that she can get past it and have another chance, eventually. It is mind boggling that editors and publishers did not catch it or suspect.</p>