<p>*** Disclaimer: This thread does NOT advocate paying people to write your admission essays for you - on the other hand, it strongly discourages any attempt to do so. It barely illustrates the sad truth…</p>
<p>Admission officers always give firm affirmations that they can sooo tell part the ‘paid’ essays and ‘self-written’ essays. Without revealing any names, a person got into YALE UNIVERSITY this year by paying someone else to write his/her essays. I knew this person for sometime and he/she did something that I would never expect him/her to do. Never.</p>
<p>It is quite sad, as another Yale hopeful, to know someone in the application pool, who eagerly wrote all his/her essays him/herself, lost a place for admission for this person who didn’t. </p>
<p>But I stand firm on the fact that writing one’s own essays is the way to go. To dishonestly do otherwise is only harming oneself and making oneself believe that one is better than one actually is. </p>
<p>I write this thread to tell let all the CCers aware of the fact that ‘paid’ essays do come through. However, as a group of bright, mature and hopeful teenagers, I have a firm belief that no one is dishonest enough to do this. To those who are thinking of it, you will be only fooling yourself. View your situation in long run. Who do you want to be? A truthful or a deceiving human being?</p>
<p>I think adcoms can tell you’ve paid someone else when your CR/W scores are below 700, yet your essay is practically a piece of literature. Also, if you aren’t paying someone to write your short answer portion of the commonapp, it might be relatively easy to detect a difference in style.</p>
<p>One of my friends’ brothers really wanted to go to USC. He paid my friend to write his admission essays for him. My friend’s brother didn’t get in. Make of that what you will. ;)</p>
<p>olgita, not necessarily. My CR score was below 700, and I was impressed with my essay, a lot of my friends and people here liked it, and I got an early notice from Swarthmore saying that they found my application most impressive and wanted to let me know in advance. CR attempts to measure reading skills, not writing skills. Of course, I don’t know if I would call my essay a piece of literature, but that depends on how you define ‘literature.’</p>
<p>Well … there is always someone who cheats the “system” … and you would hope that eventually it catches up to them. Truth is … who knows why he/she got in. Maybe the essay was a small piece of the puzzle. Everyone keeps saying that many more qualified people apply than can be accepted so he/she is likely to do just fine and never get caught in this or other deceptions. OOOOOO maybe he/she will end up on XXXX Street!?! lol</p>
<p>Another thing adcoms look at is your essay(s) in the context of your teacher recs. What if your essay is the most well-written essay the college receives that year but your english teacher thinks you are a mediocre student at best and fails to mention any talent you have in writing? It might sound stupid but adcoms look at your application holistically and I’m sure they can in most cases discern what was the applicant’s own work and what wasn’t. In the OP’s case…I guess that’s one example where an individual got extremely lucky</p>
<p>then honestly, how would they know? I agree one should do their own work because that is the only way you can show passion. Someone else won’t be as passionate about the topic as you are and you would need to show “you.” Someone else trying to show “you” won’t be revealing. However, if someone does get in with a paid essay (I’m guessing a genius work of art that has no passion) maybe it was something else that put them over the top?</p>
<p>the thing was that she wasn’t into a whole lot of ECs or won a lot of awards. This alone does not only make her stand out from the crowd. Her SAT score was below 2000. There are bunch of other people who are in similar situations. My friends, who knew her well, and I agree that the fact that she could have made it (RD) with a normal (in ivy standars) app. was the essay.</p>
<p>I read an article that says if some suspicion arises they look at the essay you wrote on your SAT…if the syles don’t seems to match at all it is very evident supposedly.
who truly knows though.
I hate people who cheat. makes me very upset. I don’t know how they sleep at night. seriously. god</p>
<p>^They read your SAT essay? Does it really get reported along with your scores? Comparing those styles would be completely impractical, imo, since you get 30 minutes to write the SAT essay on a very dumb question, while your admission essay is generally much more interesting and takes far more editing. </p>
<p>“english scores<700 don’t mean you can’t write competently.”</p>
<p>I wasn’t talking about writing competently. I was talking about writing an essay that really stuns the adcoms.</p>
<p>anyway, you’ll have to realize, it’s like viruses and firewalls. Firewalls block viruses, but those people create new viruses that can get past the firewalls. New firewalls are developed to block these, then new viruses come.</p>
<p>The admissions can find paid essays most of the time, but those professionals, in fear of losing their jobs, make their essays more real. Maybe this one got passed, but eventually admissions officers will get used to these and catch them. When that time comes, the essay profs will try to develop even more real essays. that’s the way it is. Admissions aren’t gods.</p>
<p>There’s no point in notifying the admissions board. The person already got in and the issue will eventually catch up with him in one way or another.</p>
<p>you guys know whats worse? a lot and by that i mean A LOT of international students fake their applications by putting up anything that looks impressive but colleges cant tell if they are lying or not.</p>
<p>Hey i bet a lot of us people does that too. don’t generalize. Intl competition is a lot harder than US. for example MIT is like 1 in 7 for US and 1 in 25 for intl</p>