As a Chinese student who applied to US grad schools 2 years ago, this story is interesting and somewhat sad to me, even though I always know such ghostwriting exists in China.
Unlike the wealthy Chinese students described in this story, my family is poor--even paying the application fees is no easy. Besides, I really don't like being unauthentic and cheating. I wrote all the essays myself, without buying any guides or paying anyone. Just like in this story, I searched every corner of my world and put in pieces that most represent myself. The writing process took me 3 months, which was an incredible learning experience.
In the spring when I was doing a video chat with a professor from UBC, she asked me whether I had any native speaker to help on my writing (legit to ask, I should say). One month later, I got a personal email from the chair of NYU Tisch school of Arts, that he's moved and impressed by my essay. It was reassuring the efforts paid off (at least it stood out from the fake authenticity). That fall I came to Stanford.
Thanks to Chinese education, Chinese students are usually very weak on independent thinking, we're trained to give standard answers and follow certain scripts. Applying for schools abroad is a good opportunity to re-think and re-learn. But apparently all the "consulting" services, ghostwriters have provided again, crutch to rely on and scripts to follow. After coming to the US, as they probably haven't thought clearly about why they came here, many Chinese students fail to make the best use of their time here. It can also water down the quality of education programs, as some of the students are under-qualified or not motivated.
It is an oversimplification to link "Chinese students are usually very weak on independent thinking" to "many Chinese students fail to make the best use of their time here".
Many American students also fail to make the best use of their time in America. As a matter of fact, if I had to guess based on the people I know, the average (international) Chinese student in American is probably harder working than the average American student.
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 - telling them what classes to take, which clubs to join, where and how many hours they should volunteer, etc. The end result is that these clients look like amazingly productive students with a superhuman sense of self-initiative, whereas in reality these kids simply followed a script written by some adult their parents paid large sums of money for.
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 think the clients missed out on much learning value by outsourcing it. Why are college courses giving "major" assignments that can reasonably be completed in 5-10 hours by a smart person with no training in the field? If a college degree just means you banged out a bunch of garbage essays, as it does for many people based on the assignments I saw contracted out, should we really be outraged that some people are not doing the work themselves?
I would argue that the real scandal is not that some people are paying for help, but that many degree programs demand so little in terms of knowledge and thought that they can be easily gamed in this way. I would like to see fluffy degree programs ended, so that legitimate work in the humanities can continue without anyone wasting time and resources shuffling average Joes through the pipeline to middle class office jobs.
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 lifestyle factors (e.g. going to school while working full time) that made it difficult for them to crank out all the BS assignments required of them.
It's also interesting to me that the author of this piece seems to be an independent contractor whose business increased as she became known. Generally, I would expect ghostwriters to want to keep a low profile which makes it hard to be independent. I certainly didn't want anyone knowing how I was paying the bills when I was in it. And unless you are charging top-end rates, the overhead of marketing yourself and picking up envelopes of cash at Starbucks is probably an inefficient use of time. Both of these factors mean that a lot of people end up working for agencies that do the work of finding clients and managing payments, and also provide double blinding. So the writer never knows the identity of the client, and vice versa. It's a pretty good system overall.
I really appreciate your honesty and the knowledge you shared here, but I fear your rationalizations about why what you did is not unethical are just that - rationalizations. It's wrong to do others work for them and let them represent it as their own, no matter how mundane the subject matter. It lets them receive qualifications that they didn't earn and others who want those qualifications in competition with them, do not receive them. It might just be a mundane 10 hour essay, but that person may not have had the time management skills, writing skills, or will to do it and therefore should not have received the marks that he did. On the other hand, if you didn't do it, somebody else would - but again that's a rationalization!
> Why are college courses giving "major" assignments that can reasonably be completed in 5-10 hours by a smart person with no training in the field?
Because that's precisely the point of a liberal arts or humanities education: to make you able to look at a new field with a modicum of critical thinking & intelligence.
Within the humanities, it is largely irrelevant post-grad what field you actually studied since actually working in that field (usually the only humanities jobs are in academia) means post-grad study. Instead, that field provides a framework for you to learn how to acquire, analyze, and summarize knowledge.
Hence, it's absolutely expected that any educated adult should have no problem writing in an unrelated humanities field, because they've already gone through the system.
This of course doesn't mean a random person can easily write such an essay (hence the demand for ghostwriting services). Many of my high school peers would've flunked out of even a basic college course. Hence, despite its apparent tedium, college does provide an important certification/funnel—even for mid-level office jobs, whose chief qualification is reading and synethsizing reports.
I do hope you understand how it's unethical to aid and abet people in cheating their way through college. This does a disservice to them (they likely won't learn the necessary writing/analysis skills for the workplace), to employers (they might be hiring incompetent writers), and to society (by credentialing the wrong people, potentially driving out smarter/more ethical people). It's ethics 101 that claiming someone else's work as your own is wrong.
> the heaviest users of the service were education majors.
I sadly suspect that has something to do with class dynamics. Education is not very prestigious and (based solely on the ads I see in the subway) is one of the fields (together with "business administration," "IT management", etc.) targeted at low-income/low-ability people who probably don't belong in college at all.
> 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 lifestyle factors (e.g. going to school while working full time) that made it difficult for them to crank out all the BS assignments required of them.
Not a huge mystery here; check the average GRE scores by major here (2001-2004, but the general effect is well documented): http://www.ncsu.edu/chass/philo/GRE%20Scores%20by%20Intended... . Data provided is average GRE score in Verbal, Quantitative, and writing sample, for 50 majors. Here are #s 41-50 in verbal, along with some reference points:
1. Philosophy (589)
25. Business - Bank. and Fin. (476)
41. Engineering - Industrial (440)
42. Business - Administration
43. Education - other (437)
44. Home Economics [?!]
45. Education - Special (432)
46. Education - Counseling (428)
47. Social Work
48. Education - Administration (427)
49. Education - Early Childhood (418)
50. Business - Accounting (415)
Here are the same in Quantitative:
1. Physics/Astronomy (738)
25. Education - Secondary (577)
41. Education - other (531)
42. Social Sciences - other
43. Education - Elementary (527)
44. Education - Administration (523)
45. Public Administration
46. Education - Special (502)
47. Education - Counseling (500)
48. Home Economics
49. Education - Early Childhood (495)
50. Social Work (468)
There are four education majors which don't make the bottom 20% cutoff: Education - Secondary, Education - Higher, "Education - Curr. & Instr.", and "Education - Eval. & Res.". They hold ranks 21, 30, 32, 37 (V) and 25, 34, 35, 39 (Q). So to sum up -- it's a "lifestyle" factor; it's harder for education majors to crank out their assignments because, compared to other students, they're not very smart. What you're seeing is not lesser ethics but greater need.
First, thanks for bringing this perspective, even if unpopular.
Why are college courses giving "major" assignments that can reasonably be completed in 5-10 hours by a smart person with no training in the field?
Without knowing the assignment, it's because the college students are still growing up. A lot of things that are hard for high school and college students are easy for smart adults. Part of that is because the college students haven't ever done them before and don't know what they can do.
Or maybe the assignments are just crap. That could 100% be true.
It's a pretty broken system overall but that's no excuse for your behavior. Just because a building is dilapidated is no excuse to spray it with graffiti or throw rocks at the windows. Similarly, some folks have the mentality that when developing if the build is already broken it's fine to checkin anything. The reality is that you're just making things worse but you have a convenient cover to hide behind, just like looting during a natural disaster.
I'm sure you're aware of this, but the high demand from foreign language students is likely because US colleges often have a foreign language requirement. At my college it was four semesters, which is pretty common.
The effect is that you get a slew of totally unmotivated, clueless students who slow things down for everyone else. Spanish especially, since it's the "easy" foreign language for English speakers, was overloaded with students who had no desire to be there, at least until you made it to the 5th semester and beyond classes.
She wrote an essay for a Chinese student about her mother washing clothes in a laundromat, leaving them to run errands and returning to find the clothes stolen. While leaving one's belongings unattended in a public place in China would indeed likely result in them being taken (and no one in China would do such a thing expecting anything different), China doesn't have laundromats. Never has. Not that anyone involved seems to care.
It would be like a Chinese ghost writer crafting a touching tale of an American kid's mom having to work double shifts in a KTV bar only to return home one night and find that her husband's chou tofu stand had been confiscated by the Chengguan.
I was left wondering if, in an inception kind of way, she made the story about that happening in her personal life up as a hook to get a lot of readers to read the vice article. After all she talks in the story about how incorporating a thread of pain or humanity helps the students who she ghostwrites for to get the reader of their applications to like them. Couldn't she be using the same tactic with a made-up story about the laundromat incident in Korea to get us to like her article?
This is a bit disheartening to me, but not surprising. I know of several people who have used this type of service, and some who have provided it.
For me, my essay was the difference in attending the likes of Harvard - my essay was egregiously bad, and it was explained to me by the director of admissions of one Ivy League school via a family friend who was a professor at that same university as the primary reason for rejecting me, even though by all other metrics I was an almost stellar candidate, even out of those they typically admitted.
I wonder how many people have gamed the system like such, and what effect has it had on the lives of those who would have otherwise attended those schools? For me, I have miraculously succeeded in my path, although it was a pretty unique one - the confidence I built before college in my abilities helped me overcome the setback. There are many people not so fortunate though.
We probably will never know the true effects of such unintended gaming, but it goes to show that people shouldn't take as much stock in the school someone attended but their pure mind in industry.
I'll never understand the mindset where not going to an Ivy is a "setback." That's not meant to be an insult at all, if it sounded like one.
Good for you for having that attitude, of course, but that's such a foreign state of mind to me. I stumbled across the finish line in high school and self-destructed in college. Things have worked out but I wonder what even a small change in state of mind would have done for me as an adolescent.
I have several friends here in Brazil that were accepted in top USA MBAs. All of them are very smart, but all of them hired a consultant to help with admission process.
No one hired a ghost writer, all of them wrote their own essays, but in all cases the consultant asked them to rewrite 5 or 6 times, at least. There it is where it seems to exist the ethical line: ghost writer, no good; rewrite yourself until every single sentence is exactly like the consultant wants, good.
It is easy to see that both are equally fake essays. All consultants say: "don't even bother about trying to be original or clever. Your only goal is to write exactly what the admission people want to read". And it works.
I used to work for a company writing application essays for Chinese students. I didn't write them myself but I have no moral objection. The requirements are bizarre - effectively "tell us what you know will make us like you but hide the fact that you know we want to hear it".
Should you tell the truth "I love CS and play it in all my spare time, I'm obsessed with it and usually don't get enough sleep for school because I'm so committed staying up late at night shooting people" or tell a story about an incident at the beach that makes it look like you have amazing management skills? Who knows!
University selection is ridiculous and I support any attempt to bring fairness to it like these services.
At $400 a piece, often including lengthy interviews and an overwhelming demand, the author should raise their rates. Probably by an order of magnitude.
I would argue that modern, prestigious tech companies use GitHub portfolios like admissions counselors use activity leadership and transcripts.
You're required to use all of your free time, and then a little more, to demonstrate that you have initiative and grit, that you don't need to sleep adequately or spend time on anything other than the "right" activities. Roughly analogous to taking hard classes and participating in lots of activities. Colleges don't want you "hanging out," and Facebook doesn't want you sailing or running a community theater group or raising kids or something, they want you sharpening your skills. Both employers and colleges are basically looking at, "how many hours per week do you spend on impressing us?" Proving that you ran a chronic sleep deficit and had no more than a couple of hours downtime outside of what they want to see gets you past the first cut.
Then, to make the next cut, the quality of the code you write needs to be exceptionally high (indicating that you really invested the time and that whatever your cognitive function declined to was still great.) Is your code elegant and clever? Did you write painstakingly thorough tests? Is everything perfectly documented? This is roughly analogous to having stellar grades in your AP/honors/advanced classes.
Next, as a tie-breaker, they look for interestingness. Were the apps you wrote/clubs you started innovative? Did they merely demonstrate that you are generally good at things, or did they actually make an impact on the world? (There is generally a field on the applications to elite colleges for you to submit your published, peer-reviewed scientific papers. As a 17-year-old.) That may fast-track you to the top, but lacking it won't necessarily kill you unless you're elbowed out by people who do have it.
And finally, the interview/essays. Do you write exceptionally well? Are you well-spoken? Do we like you? Do you seem like one of us? Colleges use this to keep the common threads they're interested in (at my alma mater, it's no accident that every single one of us identifies, whether obnoxiously or quietly, as an intellectual, and as much as we complain, being surrounded by people like that is kind of exactly what we're paying for). Then they create the distributions they're looking for in other elements of personality (i.e. we have to reject some bassoon virtuosos to make room for the virtuoso cellists, and we're going to need to sprinkle in a few outgoing socialites to keep the awkward nerds from killing themselves.) Though I guess some employers and possibly colleges are only going for homogeneity - the IBM of old is notorious.
It seems that basically every college and/or employer is oriented towards behaving this way, but the defining characteristic of the elite communities (whether they are corporations or universities) is that they are closer to filling their slots without "settling" on anyone.
The composition of applicant pools between institutions is not random or uniform. Certain schools only have a profile in more-intellectual circles, and I imagine it's the same with tech companies. A school may have a 2% acceptance rate among an applicant pool whose median ACT is 15. Or a school may have a 75% acceptance rate because only the overachiever children of academically elite families and school systems have heard of it. So eliteness is not necessarily acceptance rate, but more like "lack of settling."
Recruiting activity may be focused on places where smart people are likely to be more dense, but it does seem that some companies are starting to play "admissions counselor" for themselves when evaluating applicants, looking at GitHub rather than your degree.
The bit about selling her soul seemed a bit contrived. They don't have to be the applicants' stories, but they don't have to be the ghostwriter's story either -- once it's no longer a true story for the applicant, whether it's your story or total fiction seems irrelevant.
The part about interviewing the applicants made me wonder whether there is any fact checking of essays, or whether there will be in the future. The story about being poor and having your clothes stolen from a laundromat is a real tearjerker, but if the admissions officer knows that you're the child of China's 99th richest business magnate, I doubt it would help.
When I studied at a university in Fuzhou, I wrote a fair few things for friends (both students and teachers) - admissions applications, letters of reference, essays, correspondence etc. Some was just helping with language errors, some was translation and some was just downright faking (ie. "my professor is my brothers cousins uncles best friend, he said you can write whatever you want"). I figured I wrote my fair share of bullshit on my university application and subsequent job forms, so this wasn't much different...
One of the most common problems was just about bridging the gap between Chinese/Western expectations - Chinese reference letters are sometimes pages long, and filled with flowery and extravagant language to describe the candidate, whereas a Western reference letter would be concise, professional and often maybe just 2-3 short paragraphs.
It's interesting that one of the only Ivy programs which is essentially immune to this gaming of the system is Harvard Business School, which allows only one semi-optional free-form essay ("What else would you like us to know?":(http://www.hbs.edu/mba/admissions/application-process/Pages/...) and requires a follow-up letter to every in-person interview.
The irony of course is that the scions of empires and children of privilege who are being groomed for leadership essentially get a free pass at admissions. (Which has a sort of logic when you consider that they form the backbone of the class power network almost immediately upon graduation).
(As an HBS graduate I have mixed feelings about the overall privilege distribution, but admit to having no plausible suggestions of how to address it.)
So she now makes decent money but feels like she is selling her soul. That seems so common. And I find myself increasingly wondering if the world is really so screwed up that it is not possible to make it, financially, without feeling like a sell-out or if there is some other explanation for that phenomenon.
Surely, there are people in the world who are not destitute and who don't feel like they are selling their soul?
Probably. I think Mark Rosewater the designer of Magic the Gathering feels that way. For you not to feel cheap or cheated you need to love your job, be payed for it and be good at it. Finding all three is next to impossible
I know plenty of people who feel like they have a good balance between money and satisfaction with what they're doing.
Indeed, I think it's a lot easier to be financially successful doing something that you find energizing rather than soul-sucking.
I do believe, though, that you are unlikely to get maximum dollars and maximum joy from the same job. Many terrible jobs pay more because they have to. E.g., I used to work in finance, which was lucrative but awful. Whereas many nonprofits get great people at relatively modest salaries because they are, in effect, paying people in meaning. So a lot of the people I know who are happy with both their jobs and their paychecks do it by living more modestly than they could if they were only about the benjamins.
> Surely, there are people in the world who are not destitute and who don't feel like they are selling their soul?
Yup! I make great money and also strongly believe in what I'm doing (building a platform to showcase great writing).
She's helping people cheat their way into college. The soul-crushing nature of that is absolutely appropriate, and hopefully a mechanism for ending her unethical ways.
YCombinator is all tied up with VCs and incubators and such, right? In other contexts such as applying for various types of placements, are people's comment histories reviewed (including whatever amount of doxing is possible via server logs etc) to weed out "bad eggs"?
Cuz, I sure wouldn't hire anybody on here who is condoning or defending in any way cheating in school, even in the most oblique way.
What I want to know is what the difference between ghostwriting for school purposes, and ghostwriting for literary purposes, is.
Hillary Clinton and Ronald Reagan (and many others) had their autobiographies ghostwritten [1] and no one seems to really care. The definition of "autobiography" means a biography of yourself, written by you. So why do we hold different standards to academia as opposed to non-academia?
When you hire a web designer to design a website, you aren't obligated to credit the designer (if the designer doesn't mind).
I can certainly see why copying someone's essay or test answers would be cheating, and should be penalized. In a standardized curriculum the students should become proficient at the subject matter by the degree program. Allowing students to cheat would lessen the value of the degree and thus no one would want to attend that school.
But ghostwriting for college admissions? It's doing whatever you can to increase your odds of acceptance. Some people pay money for test prep (most of which is just vocabulary drilling). Some people pay money for "college counseling." Some people pay money for personal statements.
Some commenters here are saying that ghostwriting personal statements makes it unfair for the lower-income families, but test prep is definitely not cheap. SAT prep could go anywhere from $500 to $1000, for a weekend course. No lower-income family could afford SAT prep, so if we view ghostwriting as "unfair" then test prep should be unfair by the same logic.
If someone doesn't want to hire me because we hold different views on the definition of cheating, then I respect the person's opinion but I certainly wouldn't want to be hired due to too many clashes of views most likely.
Tons of rationalization for this behavior in the post and in the comments here.
There is one reason why this is wrong. When you participate in this kind of business, you are helping to perpetuate inequality in the world and making it less meritocratic, one essay at a time.
No need to expound on that I'm sure college educated minds capable of forging essays for profit will get my gist.
This reminds me of what PG writes in a start up idea essay.
"Actually, startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here's an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there's no market for startup ideas suggests there's no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless."
So a decent heuristic to see if something is able to be gamified is to look for potential hidden black markets to see if it possible, then you see see how to invest your time. In this case it seems like it would be the best choice to hire someone on an opportunity cost basis.
Exams are stupid. Qualifications are stupid. Jobs are stupid. Capitalism is stupid. We've turned pure learning into an exercise in grinding, to level up a meaningless stat.
This is the dirty trick of supposed meritocracy: if a whole lot of people have merit enough, then picking among them becomes an inflationary contest in irrelevances. Those people tricking their way past the grind are really doing nothing different than buying a pre-leveled WoW character, it isn't actually harder to play at the higher level, you just get more swag and bigger battles.
Ironically, by getting used to dole out work to others (subordinates) by paying them and expecting success is their basic managerial ethos, and one that even predominates modern Western management. This does properly prepare them in a way for management and 'modern' capitalist idealism. They have no feelings of condition to reciprocate any sacrifices of their 'employees' (in this case ghost writers) other than payment. Expecting any kind of reciprocation other than materialism and monetary in a purely capital transaction is a mistake that is common to those not accustomed to the exploitative condition of capital, economics, and enterprise.
It was interesting the author indicated the ethnicity of their background in the US. These Chinese masters of OP, who mentioned they were Korean-American where Koreans are looked down upon heavily by China and their adopted country the US, are already well aware that money alone is the primary and only necessary motivator in a capitalist economy and country.
The US' only interest in the Korean peninsula is to use it as a point of interaction with the Chinese. These Koreans are not only bootstrapped into being intermediary, but a 'bridge', which both the Chinese and Americans liberally walk all over. It is a bit of a shame the US allowed the victimization the Koreans suffered to be exploited shamelessly by both Americans and the Chinese. The hint of not finding respite, but only exploitation in their adopted land the US, is very telling of the Korean condition.
Anyone who has been to a high end business school will not be surprised by this in the slightest. Chinese (and others - lets not pick on the Chinese alone here) students who can't speak English, and yet were scoring 700+ on the GMAT are a dime a dozen. Everyone knows it, including the admissions departments - but they're under orders to increase the "international" percentage of the student body lest they get painted as "too waspy". It's a racket.
[+] [-] nicolax|11 years ago|reply
Unlike the wealthy Chinese students described in this story, my family is poor--even paying the application fees is no easy. Besides, I really don't like being unauthentic and cheating. I wrote all the essays myself, without buying any guides or paying anyone. Just like in this story, I searched every corner of my world and put in pieces that most represent myself. The writing process took me 3 months, which was an incredible learning experience.
In the spring when I was doing a video chat with a professor from UBC, she asked me whether I had any native speaker to help on my writing (legit to ask, I should say). One month later, I got a personal email from the chair of NYU Tisch school of Arts, that he's moved and impressed by my essay. It was reassuring the efforts paid off (at least it stood out from the fake authenticity). That fall I came to Stanford.
Thanks to Chinese education, Chinese students are usually very weak on independent thinking, we're trained to give standard answers and follow certain scripts. Applying for schools abroad is a good opportunity to re-think and re-learn. But apparently all the "consulting" services, ghostwriters have provided again, crutch to rely on and scripts to follow. After coming to the US, as they probably haven't thought clearly about why they came here, many Chinese students fail to make the best use of their time here. It can also water down the quality of education programs, as some of the students are under-qualified or not motivated.
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] rxin|11 years ago|reply
Many American students also fail to make the best use of their time in America. As a matter of fact, if I had to guess based on the people I know, the average (international) Chinese student in American is probably harder working than the average American student.
[+] [-] asdfologist|11 years ago|reply
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 - telling them what classes to take, which clubs to join, where and how many hours they should volunteer, etc. The end result is that these clients look like amazingly productive students with a superhuman sense of self-initiative, whereas in reality these kids simply followed a script written by some adult their parents paid large sums of money for.
[+] [-] jurassic|11 years ago|reply
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 think the clients missed out on much learning value by outsourcing it. Why are college courses giving "major" assignments that can reasonably be completed in 5-10 hours by a smart person with no training in the field? If a college degree just means you banged out a bunch of garbage essays, as it does for many people based on the assignments I saw contracted out, should we really be outraged that some people are not doing the work themselves?
I would argue that the real scandal is not that some people are paying for help, but that many degree programs demand so little in terms of knowledge and thought that they can be easily gamed in this way. I would like to see fluffy degree programs ended, so that legitimate work in the humanities can continue without anyone wasting time and resources shuffling average Joes through the pipeline to middle class office jobs.
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 lifestyle factors (e.g. going to school while working full time) that made it difficult for them to crank out all the BS assignments required of them.
It's also interesting to me that the author of this piece seems to be an independent contractor whose business increased as she became known. Generally, I would expect ghostwriters to want to keep a low profile which makes it hard to be independent. I certainly didn't want anyone knowing how I was paying the bills when I was in it. And unless you are charging top-end rates, the overhead of marketing yourself and picking up envelopes of cash at Starbucks is probably an inefficient use of time. Both of these factors mean that a lot of people end up working for agencies that do the work of finding clients and managing payments, and also provide double blinding. So the writer never knows the identity of the client, and vice versa. It's a pretty good system overall.
[+] [-] WoodenChair|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] morgante|11 years ago|reply
Because that's precisely the point of a liberal arts or humanities education: to make you able to look at a new field with a modicum of critical thinking & intelligence.
Within the humanities, it is largely irrelevant post-grad what field you actually studied since actually working in that field (usually the only humanities jobs are in academia) means post-grad study. Instead, that field provides a framework for you to learn how to acquire, analyze, and summarize knowledge.
Hence, it's absolutely expected that any educated adult should have no problem writing in an unrelated humanities field, because they've already gone through the system.
This of course doesn't mean a random person can easily write such an essay (hence the demand for ghostwriting services). Many of my high school peers would've flunked out of even a basic college course. Hence, despite its apparent tedium, college does provide an important certification/funnel—even for mid-level office jobs, whose chief qualification is reading and synethsizing reports.
I do hope you understand how it's unethical to aid and abet people in cheating their way through college. This does a disservice to them (they likely won't learn the necessary writing/analysis skills for the workplace), to employers (they might be hiring incompetent writers), and to society (by credentialing the wrong people, potentially driving out smarter/more ethical people). It's ethics 101 that claiming someone else's work as your own is wrong.
> the heaviest users of the service were education majors.
I sadly suspect that has something to do with class dynamics. Education is not very prestigious and (based solely on the ads I see in the subway) is one of the fields (together with "business administration," "IT management", etc.) targeted at low-income/low-ability people who probably don't belong in college at all.
[+] [-] thaumasiotes|11 years ago|reply
Not a huge mystery here; check the average GRE scores by major here (2001-2004, but the general effect is well documented): http://www.ncsu.edu/chass/philo/GRE%20Scores%20by%20Intended... . Data provided is average GRE score in Verbal, Quantitative, and writing sample, for 50 majors. Here are #s 41-50 in verbal, along with some reference points:
Here are the same in Quantitative: There are four education majors which don't make the bottom 20% cutoff: Education - Secondary, Education - Higher, "Education - Curr. & Instr.", and "Education - Eval. & Res.". They hold ranks 21, 30, 32, 37 (V) and 25, 34, 35, 39 (Q). So to sum up -- it's a "lifestyle" factor; it's harder for education majors to crank out their assignments because, compared to other students, they're not very smart. What you're seeing is not lesser ethics but greater need.[+] [-] lotophage|11 years ago|reply
> ... the heaviest users of the service were education majors..
Aren't you contributing to the fluffy education problem by creating fluffy educators?
[+] [-] danielweber|11 years ago|reply
Why are college courses giving "major" assignments that can reasonably be completed in 5-10 hours by a smart person with no training in the field?
Without knowing the assignment, it's because the college students are still growing up. A lot of things that are hard for high school and college students are easy for smart adults. Part of that is because the college students haven't ever done them before and don't know what they can do.
Or maybe the assignments are just crap. That could 100% be true.
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] revelation|11 years ago|reply
Here, you are usually expected to write a paper based on multiple recent papers on a current topic.
[+] [-] llllllllllll|11 years ago|reply
The effect is that you get a slew of totally unmotivated, clueless students who slow things down for everyone else. Spanish especially, since it's the "easy" foreign language for English speakers, was overloaded with students who had no desire to be there, at least until you made it to the 5th semester and beyond classes.
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] frozenport|11 years ago|reply
Nope, but you would expect them not to reveal their clients.
[+] [-] gaoshan|11 years ago|reply
It would be like a Chinese ghost writer crafting a touching tale of an American kid's mom having to work double shifts in a KTV bar only to return home one night and find that her husband's chou tofu stand had been confiscated by the Chengguan.
[+] [-] lmm|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drited|11 years ago|reply
PS - I liked the article :)
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Bahamut|11 years ago|reply
For me, my essay was the difference in attending the likes of Harvard - my essay was egregiously bad, and it was explained to me by the director of admissions of one Ivy League school via a family friend who was a professor at that same university as the primary reason for rejecting me, even though by all other metrics I was an almost stellar candidate, even out of those they typically admitted.
I wonder how many people have gamed the system like such, and what effect has it had on the lives of those who would have otherwise attended those schools? For me, I have miraculously succeeded in my path, although it was a pretty unique one - the confidence I built before college in my abilities helped me overcome the setback. There are many people not so fortunate though.
We probably will never know the true effects of such unintended gaming, but it goes to show that people shouldn't take as much stock in the school someone attended but their pure mind in industry.
[+] [-] chobo|11 years ago|reply
Good for you for having that attitude, of course, but that's such a foreign state of mind to me. I stumbled across the finish line in high school and self-destructed in college. Things have worked out but I wonder what even a small change in state of mind would have done for me as an adolescent.
[+] [-] foobarqux|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soneca|11 years ago|reply
No one hired a ghost writer, all of them wrote their own essays, but in all cases the consultant asked them to rewrite 5 or 6 times, at least. There it is where it seems to exist the ethical line: ghost writer, no good; rewrite yourself until every single sentence is exactly like the consultant wants, good.
It is easy to see that both are equally fake essays. All consultants say: "don't even bother about trying to be original or clever. Your only goal is to write exactly what the admission people want to read". And it works.
[+] [-] Yardlink|11 years ago|reply
Should you tell the truth "I love CS and play it in all my spare time, I'm obsessed with it and usually don't get enough sleep for school because I'm so committed staying up late at night shooting people" or tell a story about an incident at the beach that makes it look like you have amazing management skills? Who knows!
University selection is ridiculous and I support any attempt to bring fairness to it like these services.
[+] [-] usea|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrottenkolber|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asdfologist|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johan_larson|11 years ago|reply
Any sign employers have started to focus less on recruiting at the most prestigious schools? And if they're not looking there, where are they looking?
Come to think of it, where are the founders accepted by YC coming from?
[+] [-] superuser2|11 years ago|reply
You're required to use all of your free time, and then a little more, to demonstrate that you have initiative and grit, that you don't need to sleep adequately or spend time on anything other than the "right" activities. Roughly analogous to taking hard classes and participating in lots of activities. Colleges don't want you "hanging out," and Facebook doesn't want you sailing or running a community theater group or raising kids or something, they want you sharpening your skills. Both employers and colleges are basically looking at, "how many hours per week do you spend on impressing us?" Proving that you ran a chronic sleep deficit and had no more than a couple of hours downtime outside of what they want to see gets you past the first cut.
Then, to make the next cut, the quality of the code you write needs to be exceptionally high (indicating that you really invested the time and that whatever your cognitive function declined to was still great.) Is your code elegant and clever? Did you write painstakingly thorough tests? Is everything perfectly documented? This is roughly analogous to having stellar grades in your AP/honors/advanced classes.
Next, as a tie-breaker, they look for interestingness. Were the apps you wrote/clubs you started innovative? Did they merely demonstrate that you are generally good at things, or did they actually make an impact on the world? (There is generally a field on the applications to elite colleges for you to submit your published, peer-reviewed scientific papers. As a 17-year-old.) That may fast-track you to the top, but lacking it won't necessarily kill you unless you're elbowed out by people who do have it.
And finally, the interview/essays. Do you write exceptionally well? Are you well-spoken? Do we like you? Do you seem like one of us? Colleges use this to keep the common threads they're interested in (at my alma mater, it's no accident that every single one of us identifies, whether obnoxiously or quietly, as an intellectual, and as much as we complain, being surrounded by people like that is kind of exactly what we're paying for). Then they create the distributions they're looking for in other elements of personality (i.e. we have to reject some bassoon virtuosos to make room for the virtuoso cellists, and we're going to need to sprinkle in a few outgoing socialites to keep the awkward nerds from killing themselves.) Though I guess some employers and possibly colleges are only going for homogeneity - the IBM of old is notorious.
It seems that basically every college and/or employer is oriented towards behaving this way, but the defining characteristic of the elite communities (whether they are corporations or universities) is that they are closer to filling their slots without "settling" on anyone.
The composition of applicant pools between institutions is not random or uniform. Certain schools only have a profile in more-intellectual circles, and I imagine it's the same with tech companies. A school may have a 2% acceptance rate among an applicant pool whose median ACT is 15. Or a school may have a 75% acceptance rate because only the overachiever children of academically elite families and school systems have heard of it. So eliteness is not necessarily acceptance rate, but more like "lack of settling."
Recruiting activity may be focused on places where smart people are likely to be more dense, but it does seem that some companies are starting to play "admissions counselor" for themselves when evaluating applicants, looking at GitHub rather than your degree.
[+] [-] bane|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eck|11 years ago|reply
The part about interviewing the applicants made me wonder whether there is any fact checking of essays, or whether there will be in the future. The story about being poor and having your clothes stolen from a laundromat is a real tearjerker, but if the admissions officer knows that you're the child of China's 99th richest business magnate, I doubt it would help.
[+] [-] westiseast|11 years ago|reply
One of the most common problems was just about bridging the gap between Chinese/Western expectations - Chinese reference letters are sometimes pages long, and filled with flowery and extravagant language to describe the candidate, whereas a Western reference letter would be concise, professional and often maybe just 2-3 short paragraphs.
[+] [-] heterogenic|11 years ago|reply
The irony of course is that the scions of empires and children of privilege who are being groomed for leadership essentially get a free pass at admissions. (Which has a sort of logic when you consider that they form the backbone of the class power network almost immediately upon graduation).
(As an HBS graduate I have mixed feelings about the overall privilege distribution, but admit to having no plausible suggestions of how to address it.)
[+] [-] Mz|11 years ago|reply
Surely, there are people in the world who are not destitute and who don't feel like they are selling their soul?
[+] [-] Ygg2|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wpietri|11 years ago|reply
Indeed, I think it's a lot easier to be financially successful doing something that you find energizing rather than soul-sucking.
I do believe, though, that you are unlikely to get maximum dollars and maximum joy from the same job. Many terrible jobs pay more because they have to. E.g., I used to work in finance, which was lucrative but awful. Whereas many nonprofits get great people at relatively modest salaries because they are, in effect, paying people in meaning. So a lot of the people I know who are happy with both their jobs and their paychecks do it by living more modestly than they could if they were only about the benjamins.
[+] [-] morgante|11 years ago|reply
Yup! I make great money and also strongly believe in what I'm doing (building a platform to showcase great writing).
She's helping people cheat their way into college. The soul-crushing nature of that is absolutely appropriate, and hopefully a mechanism for ending her unethical ways.
[+] [-] metacorrector|11 years ago|reply
Cuz, I sure wouldn't hire anybody on here who is condoning or defending in any way cheating in school, even in the most oblique way.
[+] [-] abustamam|11 years ago|reply
Hillary Clinton and Ronald Reagan (and many others) had their autobiographies ghostwritten [1] and no one seems to really care. The definition of "autobiography" means a biography of yourself, written by you. So why do we hold different standards to academia as opposed to non-academia?
When you hire a web designer to design a website, you aren't obligated to credit the designer (if the designer doesn't mind).
I can certainly see why copying someone's essay or test answers would be cheating, and should be penalized. In a standardized curriculum the students should become proficient at the subject matter by the degree program. Allowing students to cheat would lessen the value of the degree and thus no one would want to attend that school.
But ghostwriting for college admissions? It's doing whatever you can to increase your odds of acceptance. Some people pay money for test prep (most of which is just vocabulary drilling). Some people pay money for "college counseling." Some people pay money for personal statements.
Some commenters here are saying that ghostwriting personal statements makes it unfair for the lower-income families, but test prep is definitely not cheap. SAT prep could go anywhere from $500 to $1000, for a weekend course. No lower-income family could afford SAT prep, so if we view ghostwriting as "unfair" then test prep should be unfair by the same logic.
If someone doesn't want to hire me because we hold different views on the definition of cheating, then I respect the person's opinion but I certainly wouldn't want to be hired due to too many clashes of views most likely.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostwriter
[+] [-] waterlesscloud|11 years ago|reply
I also wonder how much I'm kidding when I say that.
[+] [-] readme|11 years ago|reply
There is one reason why this is wrong. When you participate in this kind of business, you are helping to perpetuate inequality in the world and making it less meritocratic, one essay at a time.
No need to expound on that I'm sure college educated minds capable of forging essays for profit will get my gist.
[+] [-] eruditely|11 years ago|reply
"Actually, startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here's an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there's no market for startup ideas suggests there's no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless."
So a decent heuristic to see if something is able to be gamified is to look for potential hidden black markets to see if it possible, then you see see how to invest your time. In this case it seems like it would be the best choice to hire someone on an opportunity cost basis.
[+] [-] fndrplayer13|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] conradfr|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] msie|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] incog|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JulianMorrison|11 years ago|reply
This is the dirty trick of supposed meritocracy: if a whole lot of people have merit enough, then picking among them becomes an inflationary contest in irrelevances. Those people tricking their way past the grind are really doing nothing different than buying a pre-leveled WoW character, it isn't actually harder to play at the higher level, you just get more swag and bigger battles.
[+] [-] disjointrevelry|11 years ago|reply
It was interesting the author indicated the ethnicity of their background in the US. These Chinese masters of OP, who mentioned they were Korean-American where Koreans are looked down upon heavily by China and their adopted country the US, are already well aware that money alone is the primary and only necessary motivator in a capitalist economy and country.
The US' only interest in the Korean peninsula is to use it as a point of interaction with the Chinese. These Koreans are not only bootstrapped into being intermediary, but a 'bridge', which both the Chinese and Americans liberally walk all over. It is a bit of a shame the US allowed the victimization the Koreans suffered to be exploited shamelessly by both Americans and the Chinese. The hint of not finding respite, but only exploitation in their adopted land the US, is very telling of the Korean condition.
[+] [-] damoncali|11 years ago|reply