Writing Wrongs – Outsourcing Admission Essays
College admissions officers around the country will be reading my application essays this month, essays in which I describe personal aspirations, academic goals — even, in one case, a budding passion for the sitar. What they won’t know is that I actually graduated from college more than a year ago, and that the names attached to these essays are those of my duplicitous clients.
We are familiar with a person who put herself through an “elite” university doing this work–it’s quite lucrative. Not only was she an excellent editor and writer, the service she offered was writing exactly the kind of essay that would catch the eye of an overworked admissions officer. She saw no problem with this business, deeming it the moral problem of the families who hired her–she simply needed the money.
I find this lack of ethics very troubling, on both ends, but it doesn’t begin or end with the application to college. Cheating permeates the system. Someday maybe we can revisit the West calculus dispute as an example.