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I Ghostwrite Chinese Students' Ivy League Admissions Essays

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Re: I Ghostwrite Chinese Students' Ivy League Admissions Essays

#141

Post by blackbagboys »

austenallred wrote: post #42
asdfologist wrote: post #2

First of all - wow, what a talented writer. No wonder her clients have done so well. Forgery of college admissions essays is rampant not just in China but also in the US (and I suspect in many other places), but actually the problem is really much worse than that. With the boom of the "college consultants" industry, professionals are essentially "forging" entire high school careers on behalf of their clients - tellin…

I was paid $50/hour for quite some time to do "marketing consulting" for a company started by a douchebag studying at Harvard. It was vaguely interesting work, and I over delivered on every expectation, but grew tired of his increasingly demanding explanations (pages long at times) of why I did what I did and who the market was. Those two questions were asked of me obsessively. Eventually, after I told him I was sick…

In a similar vein, one of my bosses at a major investment bank would gleefully tell interns about how, in undergrad, while working part-time for a Congressman, he would call up the Congressional Research Service and commission reports that he would later doctor up and hand in as term papers

Re: I Ghostwrite Chinese Students' Ivy League Admissions Essays

#142

Post by cgio »

sk5t wrote: post #134
cgio wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's wrong to do others work for them and let them represent it as their own" which is what I do in my everyday job. And I am not shadow-writing, I am a consultant...Writing ideas that superiors represent as their own, or clients do. I guess this is capitalism, life or something. And someone not worth it has to be promoted before I do, as in the author's case someone has to be admitted for her to live.

Your ideas and work product are the ideas and work product of the organization, which your superiors represent... different kettle of fish.

People belong in organisations, have roles in organisations, but also act within organisations and with reference to their organisations. The assertion of representation is not always valid, and I am sure many people get the context of what I am suggesting here. Now, in the admissions process of the example, an organisation (ad-hoc but valid) is also present and the paying applicant represents the financial relationship they built with their shadow writer. Why is the ethical context different when we consider mystic, gargantuan organisations than when we consider rich, clueless teenagers?

Re: I Ghostwrite Chinese Students' Ivy League Admissions Essays

#143

Post by [deleted] »

sk5t wrote: post #134
cgio wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's wrong to do others work for them and let them represent it as their own" which is what I do in my everyday job. And I am not shadow-writing, I am a consultant...Writing ideas that superiors represent as their own, or clients do. I guess this is capitalism, life or something. And someone not worth it has to be promoted before I do, as in the author's case someone has to be admitted for her to live.

Your ideas and work product are the ideas and work product of the organization, which your superiors represent... different kettle of fish.

[deleted]

Re: I Ghostwrite Chinese Students' Ivy League Admissions Essays

#144

Post by vonmoltke »

thesteamboat wrote: post #85
jiggy2011 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's really the case either way, it's possible that having known metrics gives an even greater advantage to those who are economically well off as violin tuition gets more expensive due to rising demand. The most equitable solution would be to base admissions purely on grades but that isn't possible when you have grade inflation, because more people get straight As than there are places at top universities.

It's more than just grade inflation -- in high schools across the united states the quality of courses vary so much as to be incomparable. Suppose you and I are both taking the most advanced English classes our schools offer. If I get an A and you get a B, but you're in a high school with just 300 people in it and I'm in a high school with 3000 people, I have no idea which grade 'means' more.

Theoretically, those grades should "mean" the same, because they should be measures on an absolute scale. What matters ins the quality of the school, which is not directly tied to the number of students at it.

Re: I Ghostwrite Chinese Students' Ivy League Admissions Essays

#145

Post by blutoot »

I wonder if US would attract more quality students for the undergrad programs from around the world if it adopted a blind standardized test approach like JEE in India. SAT/ACT aren't comparable to those tests. Anytime you involve something that is open to subjective interpretation like essays that don't need to be created "live", you will open up opportunities for workarounds like this one (i.e. hiring ghost writers). Or maybe tests + interviews is the best combination since interviews bring out character and at the end of the day that's what matters - character.

Re: I Ghostwrite Chinese Students' Ivy League Admissions Essays

#146

Post by ohashi »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #135
jurassic wrote: post #34

Really interesting piece. In my post-college lull, I was once in a major financial bind and ended up doing a brief stint as an academic ghostwriter. I wrote term papers, not admission essays, for a ghostwriting service over a period of about 2 months. The work was easy and the money was good. I felt pretty guilty doing the work at first, but I quickly realized that most of the assignments were so banal that I don't t…

> The most surprising discovery for me was that it seemed like after foreign language students the heaviest users of the service were education majors. No joke. I never figured out if the noticeably heavy use by education majors was a selection bias caused by the way the service was advertising itself, a sign of especially low ethics among education majors, or an indication that there might be a higher incidence of l…

That's really sad when you think about it. It implies, on average, our minimum viable college students go into education. Not our best and brightest. Who ends up being the majority of the people teaching our children? Probably those same people.

Re: I Ghostwrite Chinese Students' Ivy League Admissions Essays

#147

Post by ohashi »

It's almost certainly not just US schools too. I remember in grad school that some of the students (at least one Chinese sticks out in my mind) were absolutely not fluent English speakers. It was definitely a requirement for the program, but they couldn't manage a coherent sentence, let alone paragraph.

Sadly, Sweden is almost entirely group projects, so I think they just got carried through by colleagues despite not being qualified in the slightest. It was frustrating and sad. There were definitely some very smart Chinese people too who should have been there. But I feel bad for the people whose spot they took who might have actually been qualified.

Re: I Ghostwrite Chinese Students' Ivy League Admissions Essays

#148

Post by beedogs »

ohashi wrote: post #147

It's almost certainly not just US schools too. I remember in grad school that some of the students (at least one Chinese sticks out in my mind) were absolutely not fluent English speakers. It was definitely a requirement for the program, but they couldn't manage a coherent sentence, let alone paragraph. Sadly, Sweden is almost entirely group projects, so I think they just got carried through by colleagues despite not…

It's way more than just US schools, and it's way more than just admissions. Entire companies have been set up which are dedicated to helping Chinese students cheat their way through university:

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/8662224/Chinese-ch...

Re: I Ghostwrite Chinese Students' Ivy League Admissions Essays

#150

Post by Padding »

> Of course, I didn’t have time for moral quandaries. As my name became more popular, I found myself with more clients than I had time to help. I couldn’t interview all of them, so I needed to find a way to produce essays faster. My solution: writing about my own intimate experiences.

This is an interesting bit. Why do that?

Standard economic theory would suggest increasing prices (and thus margins) as demand increases, rather than actually work more (and thus decrease margins).

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