Another College Cheating Scandal: Personal Essay ‘Editors’ Reveal How They Cheat for Rich
Tarpley Hitt
Photo Illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Daily Beast/Getty
Last week, the sting operation dubbed Operation Varsity Blues exposed more information on well-heeled and well-known parents who rigged the college-admissions process, in part if you are paying proctors and ringers to take or correct tests for their kids. Not even after news regarding the scheme broke, critics rushed to point out that celebrity parents like Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman did need to break n’t the law to game the system.
When it comes to ultra-rich, big contributions may get their name on a science building and their offspring an area at a top-tier school—an option California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently called “legal bribery.” Perhaps the moderately wealthy can grease the admissions process with extensive SAT tutoring or, more problematically, college application essay editing.
A 500-word essay submitted through the Common Application, about some foible or lesson, which aims to give readers a better sense of the student than, say, a standardized test score in the admissions process, there’s a high premium on the personal statement. One or more university and advising blog rank the essay among the “most important” components of the procedure; one consultant writing in The New York Times described it as “the purest part associated with application.”
But while test scores are completed by the student alone—barring bribed proctors, that is—any number of individuals can alter an essay before submission, opening it as much as exploitation and less-than-pure tactics at the hands of helicopter parents or college-prep that is expensive who appeal to the one percent.
In interviews with all the Daily Beast, eight college application tutors shed light in the economy of editing, altering, and, from time to time, outright rewriting statements that are personal. The essay editors, who decided to speak from the condition of anonymity because so many still operate in their field, painted the portrait of an industry rife with ethical hazards, where in actuality the relative line between helping and cheating can become difficult to draw.
The employees who spoke towards the Daily Beast often worked for companies with similar methods to essay writing. For many, tutors would Skype with students early on within the application process to brainstorm ideas. (“i might say there were lots of cases of hammering kids with potential ideas,” one tutor said. “Like, ‘That’s a idea that is terrible an essay, why don’t you try this instead?’”) Then, the student would write a draft, and bounce back edits using their tutor, that would grade it based on a rubric that is standardized which included categories like spelling, sentence structure, style, or whether or not it was “bullshit-free.”
Most made between $30 and $100 per hour, or around $1,000 for helping a student through the application that is entire, in certain cases focusing on as much as 18 essays at any given time for various schools. Two tutors who worked for the same company said they got a bonus if clients were accepted at their target universities.
One consultant, a Harvard that is 22-year-old graduate told The Daily Beast that, during his senior year in college, he began being employed as an essay editor for a company that hires Ivy Leaguers to tutor applicants on a selection of subjects. When he took the job in 2017, the company was still young and fairly informal september. Managers would send him essays via email, and the tutor would revise and return them, with anywhere between a 24-hour and two-week turnaround. But from the beginning, the consultant explained, his managers were that is“pretty explicit the job entailed less editing than rewriting.
“When it’s done, it requires to be great enough for the student to attend that school, whether which means lying, making things up on behalf associated with the student, or basically just changing anything so that it would be acceptable,” he told The Daily Beast. “I’ve edited anywhere from 200 to 225 essays. So, probably like 150 students total. I would say about 50 percent were entirely rewritten.”
The tutor said, a student submitted an essay on hip-hop, which named his three or four favorite rappers, but lacked a clear narrative in one particularly egregious instance. The tutor said he rewrote the essay to tell the storyline of this student moving to America, struggling to connect with an American stepfamily, but eventually finding a connection through rap. “I rewrote the essay so that it said. you realize, he found that through his stepbrother he could connect through rap music and achieving a stepbrother teach him about rap music, and I talked concerning this thing that is loving-relation. I don’t determine if which was true. He just said he liked rap music.”
With time, the tutor said, his company shifted its work model. In the place of sending him random, anonymous essays, the managers began to assign him students to oversee during the entire college application cycle. “They thought it looked better,” the tutor said. “So if I get some student, ‘Abby Whatever,’ I would write all 18 of her essays such that it would seem like it had been all one voice. I experienced this year that is past students in the fall, and I wrote all of their essays for the Common App and everything else.”
Not every consultant was as explicit about the editing world’s ambiguities that are moral. One administrator emphasized that his company’s policies were firmly anti-cheating. He conceded, however, that the principles are not always followed: “Bottom line is: It takes more time for a worker to sit with a student and help them figure things out than it does to just do it for themselves. We had problems in past times with individuals cutting corners. We’ve also had problems in past times with students asking for corners to be cut.”
Another consultant who struggled to obtain the company that is same later became the assistant director of U.S. operations told The Daily Beast that while rewriting had not been overtly encouraged, it was also not strictly prohibited.
“The precise terms were: I happened to be getting paid a lump sum in return for helping this student with this App that is common essay supplement essays at a couple of universities. I happened to be given a rubric of qualities when it comes to essay, and I was told that the essay needed to score a point that is certain that rubric,” he said. “It was never clear that anything legal was at our way, we were just told to make essays—we were told and we told tutors—to make the essays meet a quality that is certain and, you know, we didn’t ask a lot of questions regarding who wrote what.”
Many of the tutors told The Daily Beast that their clients were often international students, seeking suggestions about simple tips to break into the university system that is american. A number of the foreign students, four for the eight tutors told The Daily Beast, ranged inside their English ability and required rewriting that is significant. One consultant, a freelancer who stumbled into tutoring within the fall of 2017 after a classmate needed anyone to take over his clients, recounted the story of a female applicant with little-to-no English skills.
“Her parents had me are available in and look at all her college essays. The shape these were delivered to me in was essentially unreadable. I mean there were the bare workings of a narrative here—even the grasp on English is tenuous,” he said. “I genuinely believe that, you realize, to be able to read and write in English would be form of a prerequisite for an university that is essay4you writing service american. But these parents really don’t worry about that at all. They’re likely to pay whoever to really make the essays appear to be whatever to have their kids into school.”
The tutor continued to advise this client, doing “numerous, numerous edits about this essay that is girl’s until she was later accepted at Columbia University. Yet not long after she matriculated, the tutor said she reached back out to him for help with her English courses. “She doesn’t learn how to write essays, and she’s struggling in class,” he told The Daily Beast. “I do the assistance that i could, but I say to the parents, ‘You know, you did not prepare her with this. She is put by you in this position’. Because obviously, the skills required to be at Columbia—she doesn’t have those skills.”
The Daily Beast reached off to numerous college planning and tutoring programs while the National Association for College Admissions Counseling, but none taken care of immediately requests to talk about their policies on editing rewriting that is versus.
The American Association of College Registrars and Admissions Officers also declined comment, and universities that are top as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell, Dartmouth, and Brown did not respond or declined touch upon the way they guard against essays being written by counselors or tutors. Stanford said in a statement that they “have no specific policy with regard to the essay part of the application.”