The full saga of Opal and the Harvard plagiarist

Parent Cafe
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<p>Not coming to a theater near you: the movie version of How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, the debut novel by Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan that was yanked off shelves this week when it was found to contain multiple plagiarized passages.</p>

<p>A source close to DreamWorks, which had optioned Opal Mehta, said Friday that work on the movie, which was in the early stages of development, has been halted.</p>

<p>However all hope is not lost, there is always Bollywood!</p>

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<p><a href=“I%20suppose%20some%20people%20still%20think%20Nicole%20Simpson’s%20killer%20will%20be%20found%20any%20day%20now”>i</a>.*</p>

<p>I hear Oj is looking hard in every golf course in the country!</p>

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<p>Wild plagiarism Got a Life lesson and Got Kissed good-by to.</p>

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<p>Packaging gone amok:</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.slate.com/id/2140683/[/url]”>http://www.slate.com/id/2140683/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Makes your blood run cold.</p>

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<p>Doubtful. According to a few of my relatives, she’s quite the laughingstock in the Indian papers.</p>

<p>;)</p>

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<p>But, will she stay at Harvard? The American public has a very short memory. In two years, she’ll graduate and either head on to the grad/professional school of her choice or segue into Hollywood OR Bollywood to write screenplays of teenage heartthrob movies.</p>

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<p>The American public might forget soon enough, but her Harvard peers, TA’s, and professors?</p>

<p>She just might leave in shame.</p>

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<p>I find it very interesting that the plagiarism was first reported by The Harvard Crimson. Were they tipped off by a vengeful ex-roommate? Life at Harvard can’t be too pleasant right now.</p>

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<p>Not tipped off by a roommate. The tip-off to a Crimson reporter came from an aquaintance who read both books and noticed the similarities. The Crimson did their own investigation and then broke the story. No roommate catfight involved.</p>

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<p>With all fairness to all future applicants, rich or poor, I think colleges - especially IVies and other top name schools, should require that applicants disclose whether they paid for professional consultant to aid in their application and disclose their names. People have long been doing that when a professional tax preparer is hired to fill out tax return.</p>

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<p>Ghengis…if you think that should be on an application, so would whether a student paid for SAT tutoring. I could go on and give other examples of where parents paid for a service to help their child. Perhaps those all should be listed as well.</p>

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<p>paying $10K to a private company to get your child into college seems like something you need to let the college know. but, how to differentiate that situation from that of a kid who goes to a big public school and has to find a personal counselor out of necessity? Some kids honestly need to go out and hire people because their own school counselor doesn’t have enough time for them. obviously, that’s not the case for this girl, but it doesn’t mean you should single out folks who take advantage of offerings.</p>

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<p>What about the name of the 5th grade math tutor? I appreciate the sentiment here, but the premise is not workable and enforcement impossible. What would you propose to do it about it? Demote all ED applicants who use a service to the RD pile? Make the RD applicants who use the service be reviewed at the very end of the review cycle? Admissions officers, IMO, are hard working and quite shrewd. There will be underserving applicants who occasionally slip by, but I don’t suspect there are all that many, since most end up graduating. And, with the new writing portions of both the SAT and ACT, which can be released to colleges who request them on specific students, the reviewers have comparison of essay styles/technical competence if they feel the need. They can call GCs of students whose EC look suspect. Every admissions officer who I have spoken to about this or who has been interviewed in the media feels that, the majority of the time, they can spot the overly professionalized applications. I would suspect that a randomized blinded trial would probably not demonstrate that they are always correct. But I bet they are correct more often than they are not.</p>

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<p>Should Harvard consider her plagiarism of a published work as an honor offense within the University?</p>

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<p>There is a world of difference between the role and services offered by Ivy Wise’s Katherine Cohen and the work of thousands of dedicated counselors. Mrs Cohen is a packager and has more to do with the beauty pageant industry than with education. Putting lipstick on pigs is her not so-veiled motto, as she creates or recreates candidates according to the latest loopholes in admissions.</p>

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<p>As far as the reaction of Harvard’s students, I’d like to point to the article I quoted almost immediately after Opal’s first mention on CC in early April.</p>

<p>See post <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=170380[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=170380&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>The post contained a link to an article in the New York Observer by Leon Neyfakh, a junior at Harvard majoring in history and literature.</p>

<p>The article is available at <a href=“http://www.observer.com/20060403/20060403_Leon_Neyfakh_culture_books4.asp[/url]”>http://www.observer.com/20060403/20060403_Leon_Neyfakh_culture_books4.asp&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>"Putting lipstick on pigs "</p>

<p>That is funny.</p>

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<p>Please allow me to clarify. I advocate disclosure of using concultants, which call for much higher ticket than those using Princeton or Kaplan. I am reasonably sure that college admissions office are not interested in knowing who used those prep services or paid a few $ for tutoring. College app coaching is a totally different game. Based on what I read, Kat Cohen has 20 clients. It is only within reach of the selected few, who can afford a top notch consultant but can’t quite make a $100 mil donation. The bottom line is that I think it should be disclosed and it is up to the individual colleges to decide how much that matters.</p>

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<p>SAT prep classes should be disclosed too.</p>

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<p>I should add, however, that there is another major difference. With SAT prep courses, it is still the applicants themselves taking the test. With Consultant, there is no telling who does what part, including the essay and other matrials.</p>