<p>A really good case could be made for colleges dropping the essay on the application (which, let’s face it, could have been written by anyone) and using the essay from the SAT Writing section instead. The essay prompts on the SAT may be dumb, but at least the result is clearly the applicant’s work.</p>
<p>Outside of the essay, though, does the input of a consultant really taint an applicant? The applicant still does all the work.</p>
<p>I can see how a student from a family (or an ethnic group) that is unsophisticated about the college admissions process might benefit from the services of a consultant, especially if the high school guidance department is mostly useless, as is often the case.</p>
<p>At my child’s high school, no college counseling of any kind takes place until 11th grade. But many 10th graders at the school take courses that provide excellent preparation for certain SAT II Subject Tests. Every year, many of these students fail to take the SAT IIs simply because nobody ever suggested it to them. Invariably, these are kids who are either 1) the oldest in their families (with no wisdom passed down from older siblings), 2) from families where the parents did not go to college, 3) underrepresented minorities, or 4) new to the area. Is this fair?</p>
<p>Let me clarify again. I am not saying using college consultants is a no-no in college app. I simply advacate that it should be disclosed (so that there is no abuse) on the college app.</p>
<p>pointing to additional striking similarities between the Opal Mehta book and other published, copyrighted books. No wonder Ms. Viswanathan’s publisher caved on the issue of continuing to sell her book.</p>
<p>And she probably plagarized from web blog Opinionistas:</p>
<p>Kaavya: “I am getting ill again. I can sense it coming from that itchy pain that begins far down in your throat and gradually develops into a full-fledged racking phlegmy croup.” </p>
<p>Opinionista: “Im getting sick again. I can feel it coming on- that scratchy pain that starts deep in your throat and gradually transmutates into a full-fledged racking phlemmy croup.” </p>
<p>It seems to me that there is something “odd”, "“fishy”, or at least “irregular” about the reported terms of her publishing deal. I find it remarkable that a publishing house would agree to fork over $500,000 to a high school student on the basis of her writing teachers recommendations and her agents beseeching. </p>
<p>Maybe the reported number is inaccurate, which would explain it. If not, one might expect that some heads will roll at the publishing house.</p>
<p>I’m a mom and a writer, and I believe more and more that Kaavya Visnawathan did not consciously plagiarize, although she ended up doing it anyway.</p>
<p>I suspect that when Kaavya started working with her book packaging people, they said something like this: “You have some really good ideas here, but the way you write isn’t quite right for the audience. There’s a certain style you have to write in if you want to sell books to the young adult market. Here are a dozen recent young adult books written in the style you need to adopt. Read them, get an idea of the style, and rewrite your story so it sounds like these.”</p>
<p>I suspect that Kaavya read those books and adopted their style but did not realize that she had memorized specific phrases from the books she was mimicking. The phrases popped into her head, but she didn’t realize where they had come from.</p>
<p>I do not write fiction, but I sometimes write nonfiction articles for popular magazines, and I have often been required to adopt the distinctive writing style of a particular magazine. I do it by reading a lot of articles in the magazine and making my article sound like the others. If somebody ran my articles and the ones I had read through a plagiarism detection program, would they find matching phrases? Maybe. I can’t be sure. I make an effort to avoid it, but I can’t be sure. Neither could Kaavya.</p>
<p>Marian, I also believe that Kaavya was unconscious when she “wrote” her novel. The sound of her scanner used to lift entire paragraphs into her word processor must have been torpor inducing. </p>
<p>She stole the plot, she stole the ideas, and after all the sleuthing is complete, we’ll find out she stole from many additional sources. </p>
<p>Why did she do this? She was caught in a web of exxagerated expectations for a untalented teenager who got away with a fabricated and probably heavily “borrowed” draft, and could not face to have to admit to be a fraud and a thief.</p>
<p>sorry, but respectfully disagree. The girl just plain stole others work and was caught. Too bad she isn’t at a school with an honor code, of the other students would kick her out for shaming them indirectly. Going to a junior college for a couple of years might let her grow some humility.</p>
<p>Kluge, if we were talking about genre conventions, probably none of them. The definition of genre is to use a set of accepted conventions. But we’re not; we’re talking about long stretches of dialog or description with similar sentence patterns, conversational gambits, specific details and references, with, once in a while, a name changed, adjectives reversed, etc. </p>
<p>Yeah, mysteries often have the hardboiled detective, romance novels have the dark and handsome stranger, scifi has the human-like computer. But the words and details the writers use to convey them, the specific actions, adjectives, dialog, metaphors, etc, better not be following along in the same order and pattern. </p>
<p>…and high school chick-lit books have a cafeteria where the social “A-group” all sit together, and the jocks all sit together, and the “dregs” all sit together. They have guys who wear “faded Vans” Girls face the dilemma between being “smart” or being “popular”, etc. I actually read the “45” instances of claimed plagiarism. I found 4 or 5 that were very similar, another 4 or 5 which were close, and the rest were just stock situations, descriptions and dialog. Yeah, I think this author went too far. But seriously, the tut-tutting and satisfied tongue wagging on this thread (and elsewhere) has a bit too strong a flavor of schadenfreude for my taste.</p>
<p>You can call it schadenfreude if you want, but I call it caring about the integrity of an artist’s work. Plagiarism is stealing; anyone who creates is hurt by it, even genre writers.</p>
<p>Look at the passages in the NYTimes article from another borrowed book. It’s not just the kids in the cafeteria. It’s *words[i/].</p>