Ghostwriting ivy league admissions essays for wealthy Chinese
Very interesting article (link inside post) about ghostwriting for wealthy chinese students for Ivy League admissions. Has anyone here thought of or know of anyone who has done this? At first I would have thought you need to know Chinese, but the author is Korean American. This doesn't seem to be a bad part time job, especially if you went to an Ivy, or even better, HYP.
More info: http://www.vice.com/read/i-ghostwrote-hundreds-of-chinese-students-ivy-…
Cheating is bad mmmkay.
Parents ghostwrite their kids admissions essays all the time.
Sounds like a waste of time unless you already have a few dozen lazy rich Chinese kids on speed dial who need help with their admissions essays. Though if that's the case you sound like a loser with bigger problems, soooo... yup.
I have friends from China and I heard they cheat on everything. Their schools fake the high school transcript for them to overstate their scores. As for ghost writing, I have heard some are paying 40k usd for h/y/s and 15k for schools like lower ivies.
The intern we used to have here at the office said that in China they have a website that has a bank of all the questions that test takers have experienced on the GMAT for the month, and then once it changes over to new questions the website resets. So you could just study the questions and answers for a week and then just take the test.
This is true, we do. Also for GRE. But ETS/GMAT will change questions randomly so people rarely got questions they saw. IMO, if someone studies only those materials, he/she won't get a good score
I can confirm that the question banks and written-essay banks are real. There are also people who will take the GMAT/GRE for you. They have agents which have a stable of professional test takers, and you send the agent your passport pic and they match you with a test taker that looks like you. Then you buy your test taker your passport and they take the test. I don't think that the transcripts are faked.... but who knows.
High schools don't fake transcripts for us. What we got is what we got. (although you can fake transcripts anywhere in the world if you have enough money and connections) As for ghost writing, there is such a thing. But if someone pays 40k for ghost writing then he must be nuts. usually what I heard is 2-5k Chinese yuan.
Cheating is rampant overseas anyone remember the South Korean SAT cheating scandal? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/13/south-korea-sats-cancelled-che…
It happens here too of course, but it's much more difficult and we are a guilt culture as opposed to a shame culture.
I could go on and on with stories about things similar to this but on steroids compared to just ghost writing essays (and most of them have to do with Chinese nationals wanting to do something out of the PRC-get their kids into college, do business generally, etc), but just don't do it. If you get caught you're screwed: if you're in college, you'll probably get kicked out and/or it will irreparably stain you professionally. It's just not worth it. At the end of the day all you have is your reputation and if people know you'll lie, cheat and steal, they won't do business with you. Unless you're a Chinese billionaire in China. Then everyone will kiss your ass to do business with you.
delete
delete
delete
Lucky Charms, what do think you think about people ghostwriting admissions essays?
I don't know of anyone who has done this for sure but I can tell you that I've interviewed Chinese kids at top B schools and seriously question how they got in given their poor language skills (both verbal and written). It's gotten so bad that I now require brief - sometimes VERY brief - phone calls before scheduling an in-person interview.
I alluded to it and without getting into details, I know one kid who's dad was rich and powerful in the PRC and he wanted the eldest son at a prestigious US university but the kid hardly spoke a lick of English and wasn't that smart to begin with. He had tutors galore and when that didn't work they not only had ghost writers but they found other Chinese kids that looked like him to take the English language tests, SAT's, etc. It was outrageous and so wrong but the family couldn't understand why the rich and powerful Dong (fake) family couldn't get their son into a top school just on their name alone or that they couldn't just bribe their way in, not realizing institutions that are hundreds of years old with 10&11 figure endowments will not bend their ethical standard for a few million. And when all of that was said and done, the unethical behavior of cheating their way in wasn't even a second thought.
at my school there are several offsprings of billionaires whose admissions should be questioned. that these institutions with billions of dollars in endowments cannot be bought for a few million dollars is just not true
perhaps they should have tried USC and told the school that their son could row
"not realizing institutions that are hundreds of years old with 10&11 figure endowments will not bend their ethical standard for a few million."
Pretty sure if you give enough for a building they'll let you in
There are a number of EB-5 kids in my program who 1. Don't speak English at all and 2. Don't know/care about the subject matter at all. Pretty disheartening, especially when it comes to group work. No chance their TOEFL scores were accurate and they cheat religiously and pretty blatantly in class.
As a Chinese student I agree with that. I met people from good or even prestigious schools and I had no idea how did they get in. Another question here is, does money buy you a way into HYP? I don't think so, but maybe? Anyone?
I know several people who did this from my high school. It was a boarding school with a lot of foreign kids (me included), and a lot of Chinese and Korean students did use ghost writers. (Disclaimer: I wrote my own essay of course) It would have been really hard for them to get in any other way since they couldn't put a grammatically correct sentence together for their lives.
On the other hand, there were several Thai royal scholars at my school who got into very prestigious schools (Chicago, Columbia, Claremont Colleges, etc) on their own who pretty much didn't and still don't speak English. I guess if you're really smart, you don't even need to speak English to get into top schools.
Let me guess. Choate?
Not one of the big name high schools. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if there were 0 alums from my high school on WSO
There were Thai Royal Scholars at my high school too, some of whom could not speak a lick of English. You have to realise though that they are the top of the top in their country and are basically groomed for high positions in their country, which university wouldn't take them in? Would you rather take in a kid destined to become a Minister in the Thai Government, or some American kid just because his grammar was better?
Ghost writers are a huge problem, but its foolish to think that its just the Asian kids that do it. There are plenty of essay "help" companies out there.
I get a lot of PMs asking me to review MFE apps. I normally do it for free. Folks have gotten into MIT, NYU, etc. I had no idea I should be charging for this stuff. Hell I'll edit (I won't write it) your essay for a $15K contingency on a Columbia admit. (Assuming you have a shot)
Nobody writes their grad school or even undergrad admissions essays alone. They write the first draft, then their parents, coworkers, teachers, and older friends review it, edit it, correct it, add new material, stretch the truth, etc.
I don't like the aspect of "Here. Write my essay for me." And I don't like the whole pay to play system. But if you think it's cheating to find someone (EG a friend or parent) to comment on and edit an admissions essay, the vast majority of college and grad students should be expelled.
Write your essay, get people to suggest edits, and submit. There is no difference between that and hiring someone to edit your essay or to make changes to it.
delete
delete
By the definitions being thrown around here, you are guilty of cheating if:
-Dad looked at your college application before you mailed it in and pointed out that you confused to with too.
-Your teacher suggested you mention being on the Varsity Football team on your apps and you followed her advice.
-A coworker with an MBA asked to take a look at your app, added a bunch of comments and edits, and you made changes accordingly.
-Your older brother at Cornell helped you focus on themes for your essays there.
My take: The core substance of the essay should be your own work. But foreign students deserve the same edits and keen English grammar sense (as well as marketing sense) that American parents and coworkers have. It just takes more work.
I also think the $15K to $40K is well-earned. (1) You are working on contingency- for every 1 admit at Princeton you need 10 applicants, and (2) an honest process that keeps it their original work requires a lot more back and forth.
I don't think that having someone help you write your essay conveys any unusual or unfair advantage. It's simply what most people do. And I also think the perception (dare I say reality?) of honesty in the West may actually give US and Northern/Western European students an unfair advantage over students from other cultural backgrounds.
People look at a western application differently. We know you probably haven't lied your way through it. We know that while your teachers are obviously gunning for you to get in, there's a limit to how much they will stretch the truth. This gives you a much bigger advantage than the best liar in a cheating country has. So just remember the game theoretic here and know that most of your US competition is also playing by the rules and doing extremely well at it.
The only thing I ask of everyone is:
-write the first draft of your essay. -tell the truth. An admissions essay is a marketing document; you can stretch the truth, but you can't lie. -understand and agree with the edits that went into your essay.
If you do those three things, you are making a reasonably honest application.
While this is pretty obviously bad, how different is it from paying a couple grand for an MBA admissions consultant?
I agree with @"IlliniProgrammer" there are some pretty broad definitions of cheating on this thread.
I should clarify that I don't agree with what is happening in the article. You can't submit an essay that's a lie. You can't submit an essay that isn't substantially your own. Fortunately this is very straightforward to spot check in interviews.
If I were an interviewer I'd get suspicious if the essay were written in perfect English and my interviewee were tripping over articles, and probably ask a few questions about the experience he described in the essay. There's nothing wrong with getting help on an essay; there's just a problem with lying on one or have someone else completely write it.
It is OK to pay someone to edit your essay tho, IMHO, which is what I think most of these students are doing, and which results in the same or better results when admits come out.
A successful essay is the process of a conversation. And it will require a few iterations.
Well, there is gaming the system, and there's flat out cheating. Both annoy me but you might as well hold your breath for the next Tour de France winner to be drug-free.
They do call them target schools for a reason. Banks know that students from these schools manipulated the admissions process and have the tools to manipulate their muppets/clients in the future.
If everyone else does that kinda shit, I wanna do that shit. Why wasn't I given this memo that everyone does this kinda shit. Someone teach me their manipulative ways please!
I think that Americans and Northern Europeans are a little bit more honest than average and they get a lot of credit/benefit for this. I think we're also better at spotting and punishing people who lie and cheat.
I dunno. I think most of the people at these schools are reasonably honest people.
I think some of them have really screwed up parents. Some of them are still traumatized about it.
I think the admissions system works fairly well at penalizing people who lie and cheat. I think it's more forgiving of these gray areas like "how much can someone else write my essay if I've written the first draft?"
I don't think college admissions is a true meritocracy. Poor and middle class Asians get royally screwed, and I think it screws over poor and middle-class white kids too, tho not quite to the same extent. (I am white for the record). All else being equal, it's easier to get in if your parents are worth eight, nine or ten figures. But it's fairer than most natural systems.
Whoa. All my papers for the past 4 years that I've handed in have been 1st drafts. Fuck the world. I'm so pissed. Like, seriously.
Anyone who doesn't do their own shit is a retarded degenerate piece of shit. And anyone who condones that type of behaviour is even worse.
Heck, I'd write four drafts but always get Bs in English, and I've been told I tell good stories on WSO.
Don't feel so bad. But maybe investigate the ADD thing. If you have trouble concentrating, you can get help for that.
I write all of my own admissions essays, but I'd submit them to ~20 different people for comment/review. I don't see how paying people to comment/review and type the changes in is fundamentally different.
We are the kind of society that still punishes cheaters, penalizes dishonesty, and expects people to behave honestly.
That means people invest in our companies.
That means people hire people to work here.
That means the smartest people come here and wind up in the life stations they deserve.
That means people are more likely to trust us when we tell the truth.
Countries that don't do this (and most don't) don't benefit from this dynamic at the same level.
I think the traits that you have mentioned here are the things that really separate the U.S. from other Asian countries.
In South Korea for example, if you are born in Gangnam (a wealthy neighborhood) as opposed to Eunpyung-gu (a neighborhood where kids’ parents work at small mom-and-pop shops), your chance of attending top-tier schools are much higher than otherwise. This largely stems from the parents’ ability to pay for all those after school private cram school tuition fees and elite private schools. Those combined together, can easily add up to 2K per month. Moreover, these days, the South Korean kids attend English kindergartens, and I heard it costs about 1K per month.
Of course, it’s not a problem as long as it does not break the “level playing field.” But the problem is that there is no proper public educational system at place, because the public school teachers are mostly unmotivated and incompetent, and this leaves the kids who solely rely on the public system to be ill-equipped with the skills that are needed to excel on the college entrance exam. This is why we see wide variances in the number of students who break into top schools depending on which neighborhood they are raised from.
The addiction to “steroids,” in order to be ahead of the curve, does not end there. The Korean college kids spend 20K on luxurious language trips in the U.S., Canada, or other English-speaking countries, mostly funded by their parents, in order to mark up their English test scores that will be used for applying to Samsung, Hyundai, LG, and other Korean elite conglomerate companies. There are other private tutoring going on in the college scene, such as English test preparation cram schools, corporate aptitude test cram schools, corporate application essay (cover letter is non-existent, and instead every applicant has to write a very long essay before submitting their application), CFA test preparation schools, etc.
And I heard that somehow the GMAT applicants in South Korea know which problems were on the MOST recent tests because everything is circulated to applicants who attend GMAT cram schools and pay 1K per month (the essay wriitng from someone else is 10k.)
These cause the system to embrace the kids who are born from rich parents to excel as opposed to those who have the real talent. But this make them unable to take initiatives and do things on their own, because they lack the ability to generate new ideas or solve problems without the support from tutors, and we know that there is no tutors once we graduate from school.
It is this lack of and distorted human capital development from the very early on that hampers the growth of the country and is leading to the nation’s plateau today. This is why there is no Silicon Valley and is why foreigners don’t conceive Korean companies as true competitors other than highly-advanced copy cats. There is lack of social cohesiveness and trust among the people because of organically led self-development process is non-existent and because the system embraces cronyism and stratification of their people instead of meritocracy.
The best colleges are in the US and teach in English. If IIT Mumbai becomes the best engineering school in the world, I should have the opportunity to apply there if they call themselves a meritocracy. And if I can study enough to do OK in an engineering class, what's it to you?
Paging Mike Ross
America is a society that punishes people who get caught. Don't get caught.
This thread is redic. Lucky charm is trolling everyone. That or socially retarded.
Fine. Then I'm socially retarded. Thanks.
You're right. America is a society that punishes people who get caught. But why are we condoning these submission services that make it easier for people to act unethically?
And this isn't even about the honest people in the game feeling slighted. Like whatever..I don't care. I'm not going to try to one-up them by acting unethically myself. I'll hold on to my integrity and good values, thank you.
This is about retarded kids going to college in America and literally being a strain on the system of education. Like not only do they not contribute to the classroom experience, they destroy the quality of teaching/learning for those who are capable of doing well.
Why does their lack of preparation/knowledge for college contribute to slowing down other people's progress in school? That's fucked up.
Or ADD.
But I still think most successful people in this country are reasonably honest. Most people might work on homework with other people but would not cheat on an exam, even if there were little chance of getting caught. There is a sense of guilt about crossing clear black and white lines.
I dunno. At my grad school everyone spoke English. As in they had accents but they spoke it fluently.
That's not true of everyone on the trading floor where I worked.
K then I guess it's just me and my retarded fucked up school that is filled with retarded fucked up foreign kids who can't piece together a decent sentence in English.
What school do you go to? Just curious.
Does it matter if they can speak English? EG are they in your poetry class or your engineering class?
Regardless of class, if your school is as rampant with these people as you say it is, doesn't that make it easier for you to set the curve and get higher grades?
Also, if your solution to every problem is to whine as much as you have in this thread then life will be very hard for you.
I'm not whining. I'm contributing to this thread topic and adding a different perspective.
And no it doesn't make it easier because 80% of the shit we do at school in my program is group work. Group work = me babysitting these fuck-tards for an entire semester while I end up doing 90% of the project and giving everyone As. And they did butt-fuck-nothing while I poured my blood/sweat/tears into work. Shitty feeling.
I still think we are a country that is "don't do it" rather than "don't get caught". People feel guilty about material lies and cheating. ( just not about the gray areas). And because we have this guilt- because we are used to acting somewhat honestly- we can do a better job of telling when people are being totally dishonest. It gives us a better sense of truth.
+1 SB
Excellent comeback. Couldn't think of anything else, could you?
How does this bode for you and for them when you hit the real world?
I dunno man. Life sucks. That's all I know. I don't feel like discussing this anymore. Too busy listening to Jay-Z on repeat.
Lucky Charms is ruining this site for me.
I think LuckyCharms is Beny23's younger sibling.
being an international myself sometimes it boggled the mind how did Chinese kids end up in my college considering they couldnt even form proper sentences in english, let alone be able to speak it. English isnt my first language either but I could speak it fairly fluently (with a tinge of an accent) before coming Stateside. Honestly anyone who gave SAT and did ok even should have a good command otherwise its just not possible to end up with 2100+ score which made the case of these Chinese kids very shady.
I remember this one incident where I was paired with a Chinese kid (who was def a 3.7+ gpa kid in a major where a sub 3 was the average). In the presentation portion, he absolutely bombed it and brought our grade down for the project. This was despite him learning his portion of the presentation verbatim because he clearly couldn't present it otherwise. In the individual research paper we had to submit he somehow ended up with an A. lmao. How the hell could the Professors not notice and investigate this blatant discrepancy?
International student from Zimbabwe here. I speak four languages albeit I learned English first. While I want to complain and ramble about how such instances of cheating are bad and devalue all the effort I put in to get where I am now, money will always talk at the end of the day.
Sad but the lesson here is to "get rich and have an easy life for yourself and your kin."
Funny old thread. Kids from China cheat, and in other news the sky is blue.
Nearly every major American academic scandal in the past decade has involved Chinese nationals either cheating on admissions essays, on SATs/GREs/another test, or simply cheating when at university. I even have a friend who teaches at an international high school here in the states and she tells me that every year she has to give a talk to the Chinese students about plagiarism and why it's wrong. More than a few inevitably end up cheating though and she fails them like clockwork. American universities continue to allow this garbage though because Chinese kids pay full tuition on their parents' dime and those endowments aren't gonna fund themselves.
Yep ik many people who do this! I'm from a major city in Canada and many chinese in my city do this too so it's not surprising at all. If ur just paying someone else to write your essay, you're missing out - these guys are paying people to package them for ivy league applications since start of middle school (creating fake extracurriculars, doing photo ops, etc.) Thes "college counselors" make big money doing this and it's almost exclusively sold to wealthy Chinese immigrants. The obsession with American schools is insane. I honestly don't know what they tangibly get out of their ivy league education - it's just elitism and parents who want the absolute best for their kids and bragging rights.
Omnis accusantium fugiat blanditiis sint illo fugit perferendis officia. Natus culpa est explicabo.
See All Comments - 100% Free
WSO depends on everyone being able to pitch in when they know something. Unlock with your email and get bonus: 6 financial modeling lessons free ($199 value)
or Unlock with your social account...
Dolores voluptatem quia qui quae. Aut sint ducimus omnis sint. Quidem quos consequatur ipsam. Dolores voluptatibus maiores provident quia dolorum rem corporis. Fugiat recusandae molestias veniam ad rerum. Omnis consequuntur quos ipsa sed in consequatur ut quaerat. Ut eaque voluptatem vel et consequatur saepe dolorum.
Qui id consequatur harum molestiae quaerat. Quo qui qui excepturi amet sit debitis. Amet enim sint adipisci ea.
Recusandae corporis eos suscipit eum qui rerum harum. Molestias consequatur optio earum accusamus distinctio neque qui. Voluptate blanditiis molestiae omnis dolorem et atque.
Et ratione sit vero voluptate quos vero distinctio porro. Consectetur praesentium voluptatum iure sapiente voluptas voluptas ad maiores. Aspernatur odit iste consequatur molestiae sunt architecto maiores aperiam. Voluptate voluptates ut laborum quia possimus enim. Sit eius delectus ducimus perferendis quos tempora eveniet.
Reiciendis error consequuntur occaecati odit nihil natus ducimus voluptatem. Sit et et nobis voluptatem nobis asperiores quisquam. Cumque iste fugiat eum repellendus magnam.
Soluta quas reiciendis dolorem doloremque dolorem est asperiores. Aliquam dolor omnis consequatur. Alias ea qui ipsum eos saepe est. Nihil explicabo laboriosam sint alias. Beatae aut est minus et dolores maxime non.
Magnam et in quas. Molestias neque ullam et minus id et molestiae. Illo eos optio vitae non facilis alias. Quo sint deleniti placeat odio eos soluta provident fuga.