23rd February 2011
Inside the multimillion-dollar essay-scoring business
“Then came the question from hell out of Louisiana: “What are the qualities of a good leader?” One student wrote, “Martin Luther > King Jr. was a good leader.” With artfulness far beyond the student’s age, the essay delved into King’s history with the civil rights movement, pointing out the key moments that had shown his leadership. There was just one problem: It didn’t fit the rubric. The rubric liked a longer essay, with multiple sentences lauding key qualities of leadership such as “honesty” and “inspires people.” This essay was incredibly concise, but got its point across. Nevertheless, the rubric said it was a 2. Puthoff knew it was a 2.
(Via Long Reads)
9th February 2011
Confessions of a Prep School College Counselor
“Nothing makes today’s Ivy League admissions officer sit up and take notice more than a flak jacket and flying shrapnel—that is, as long as it’s accompanied by a 5 on the AP physics exam and a combined SAT score of 1420 or better. For the most part, the current books on the subject of elite-college admissions share a numbing sameness, although I did find The Princeton Review’s College Admissions remarkable for its rather caustic counsel: “Misspellings in your application can make you look like a moron,” it advises, and “You probably should not attach a photograph to your application if you are very overweight.” I’d like to have most of these books burned.
19th January 2011
17th January 2011
The Hazards of Duke
“Something ugly is going on at the university—a mercenary intensity that has been gathering strength for the past two decades, as the institution made the calculated decision to wrench itself into elite status by dint of its fortune in tobacco money and its sheer ambition. It lured academic luminaries—many of them longer on star power than on intellectual substance—built a fearsome sports program, and turned its admissions department into the collegiate version of a head-hunting firm.
23rd November 2010
Students Are Supposed to Read Books, Not Burn Them
“In 2006, The Dartmouth, the student newspaper of Dartmouth College, a liberal arts college in New Hampshire, published a cartoon showing Nietzsche conversing with a male student. The student was with a very drunk girl after a night of boozing and schmoozing and was wondering whether or not he should have sex with her. ‘Will to power’, Nietzsche tells him. The cartoonist said it was intended as a pisstake of Nietzsche, and more broadly of his rehabilitation in liberal academic circles, but some Dartmouth students saw things differently – in their eyes the cartoon was effectively okaying date rape. So they did what any well-educated, privileged students at a liberal arts college would do – gathered outside the offices of The Dartmouth and publicly burned copies of the offending newspaper.
15th November 2010
The Myth of Charter Schools
“American public education is a failed enterprise. The problem is not money. Public schools already spend too much. Test scores are low because there are so many bad teachers, whose jobs are protected by powerful unions. Students drop out because the schools fail them, but they could accomplish practically anything if they were saved from bad teachers. They would get higher test scores if schools could fire more bad teachers and pay more to good ones. The only hope for the future of our society, especially for poor black and Hispanic children, is escape from public schools, especially to charter schools, which are mostly funded by the government but controlled by private organizations, many of them operating to make a profit.
13th November 2010
‘Too Asian’?
“Discussing the role that race plays in the self-selecting communities that more and more characterize university campuses makes many people uncomfortable. Still, an “Asian” school has come to mean one that is so academically focused that some students feel they can no longer compete or have fun. Indeed, Rachel, Alexandra and her brother belong to a growing cohort of student that’s eschewing some big-name schools over perceptions that they’re “too Asian.” It’s a term being used in some U.S. academic circles to describe a phenomenon that’s become such a cause for concern to university admissions officers and high school guidance counsellors that several elite universities to the south have faced scandals in recent years over limiting Asian applicants and keeping the numbers of white students artificially high.
The Shadow Scholar
“You’ve never heard of me, but there’s a good chance that you’ve read some of my work. I’m a hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary. My customers are your students. I promise you that. Somebody in your classroom uses a service that you can’t detect, that you can’t defend against, that you may not even know exists.
11th October 2010
An Academic Question
“We once cherished our universities—but now feel that there are too many of them and they hand out worthless degrees. Why have our highest seats of learning become so unloved?
17th September 2010
Plagiarism and Essay Mills
“We ordered a typical college term paper from four different essay mills, and as the topic of the paper we chose… (surprise!) Cheating.
