From the issue dated March 1, 2002

Duke Asks Applicants if They Got Help on Essays, and Most Say They Did

By ANDREW BROWNSTEIN

For Mediha Abdulhay, applying to Duke University this fall was a chance to explore her confused identity as the daughter of a Roman Catholic mother and a Muslim father. In her application essay, the senior at Bethlehem, Pa.-based Moravian Academy concluded that she didn't "need a structured religion to find spirituality."
That's hardly a shocking topic for an admissions essay. The unusual part of Ms. Abdulhay's application came in answer to another question. There, she indicated that Sally Pont, her English teacher and the author of two books, read her essay three times.
"The question I asked her most was 'Is this good? ''' she wrote. "On the third time, when she said yes, I knew I could stop worrying. She did not think for me, she simply lent me the perspective she has on writing that I have not yet developed."
This year, Duke asked its 15,800 applicants from more than 6,000 high schools to accompany their essays with detailed explanations of how they pieced them together. They were asked whose advice was sought, what help they gave, and how much of that help was reflected in the final product.
This is the second year the university has attempted to get to the heart of a complex and controversial admissions question: Are students' essays their own?
The issue has been around for at least a decade, as wealthy students started paying admissions consultants as much as $5,000 to massage their applications. In the past three years, the Internet has democratized the help business. Now, more than a dozen Web sites offer application advice for far smaller fees.
'Are You Beating Your Wife?'
Duke created significant buzz in the admissions world when it became the first major university to ask students about essay help. Still, even those officials who praise Duke for highlighting the problem wonder if it is introducing a powerful moral dilemma into the admissions process. At a time of intense competition, when students sometimes prepare more than 10 entrance essays, is Duke inviting students to lie?
Sarah M. McGinty, a supervisor in Harvard University's Graduate School of Education and author of The College Application Essay (College Board, 1997), calls Duke's requirement an "are-you-beating-your-wife question."
"It sets up in the mind of the students an awkward relationship to the institution -- almost like a cop," says Peter Osgood, director of admission at Harvey Mudd College, in California. "The process is already so ridden with anxiety."
Tedd Kelly, an enrollment consultant and author of Going to College ... Without the Stress (Xlibris, 2002), recently counseled a National Merit Scholarship Program semifinalist from a top high school in Northern Virginia. The student told Duke she changed one item on her essay based on advice from her mother. She was ultimately deferred -- and believes it was because she answered the question honestly. "All of her friends -- and there are many -- in that high school who know what happened to her will probably answer similar questions in the future with a resounding no," Mr. Kelly says Duke says its critics are reading too much into the question.
Christoph O. Guttentag, the university's director of undergraduate admissions, likes to compare the job of reading applications to his graduate work in musicology, for which he earned a master's degree. Determining the authorship of a piece of music requires the ability to form a mosaic of often seemingly contradictory elements: the language of the text, the watermark, the style of writing.

The Admissions Mosaic
The college application can also be something of a mystery. For example, what of the student who gets good grades and writes an impressive essay full of accomplishments, but whose teacher recommendations reveal that he really didn't stand out from the crowd?
"That's where the question comes in," Mr. Guttentag says.
"Maybe they don't know him very well. Maybe he's quiet. Or maybe he's had help in polishing himself in a way that the picture presented in the essay represents something that isn't there."
To use his metaphor, the question is another piece of the overall mosaic. It was created, he says, in response to a feeling "out there in the admissions community" that the amount of essay help had increased, about which "there was a lot of talk, but no data."
Mr. Guttentag acknowledges that it is difficult to pin down how much help is too much. "We're going to think of an essay reviewed by three different teachers differently than one reviewed by parents," he says. "But it isn't going to make much difference either way."

Lots of Advice
In introducing the question, Duke attempted to make it more palatable by noting that "all good writers seek feedback, advice, or editing." Indeed, students overwhelmingly admitted to getting some form of help. Few surprises there. What has startled Mr. Guttentag and his staff is the degree to which students seem to have answered the question honestly and with gusto.
Some, like Ms. Abdulhay, say their work was read by a respected teacher or their parents, with help limited to simple feedback on the final product. But often, the advice was far more prescriptive. Many students, including those who were ultimately accepted, had their work read by three or four people -- from the high-school guidance counselor to a server at the local coffee shop -- who helped with copy editing, editorial advice, and even strategy on how to woo the admissions board.

An Unexpected Window
One public-school student, who was accepted early decision, acknowledged that her parents made significant red marks on her essay, arguing for changes in style, tone, and content. Natalia Antonov, a student at Charlotte Latin School, a private school in North Carolina, gave a trusted English teacher her essay on being caught between two cultures -- the United States and her native Russia. The teacher, she notes, "tore it to shreds and thought it was pathetic." Nonetheless, she was accepted under early decision. Ms. Antonov, who gave Duke permission to use her name, jokes that the help statement was "a chance to show how tough the process is, and maybe feel a little sorry for myself."
The question has opened an unexpected window onto the complex give-and-take involved in the application process. The most surprising revelation is the degree to which adults discourage students from taking chances, and the way students resist attempts to stifle their voices. Contrary to the predictions of Duke's critics, the question is actually eliciting responses that may be more honest than the essays themselves.
"One of the things we're noticing is that this part of the application is not packaged," says Mr. Guttentag. "The applicants seem to feel less of a need to sell themselves. They tend to be direct and often humorous." Not surprisingly, few students have admitted to using high-priced consultants or Web-based essay sites. Of the 15,800 applicants who applied this year, roughly two dozen said they had used consultants and only one said he had used the Internet. Does that worry Mr.Guttentag? "A little," he says.
"I would have to believe that at least some of our applicants have used an essay service," he adds. "But a person who's done that isn't likely to tell us."

The Role of the Essay
Duke's findings support recent admissions research. This summer, Ms. McGinty, of Harvard, completed a survey of more than 400 high-school seniors for the National Association for College Admission Counseling. The students overwhelmingly reported receiving at least one or two sources of help. The phenomenon crosses economic boundaries, although students in some poorer schools often had less counseling available to them. Yet, at a time when the admissions proc-ess is under unprecedented attack, Ms. McGinty wonders why Duke has singled out the essay for scrutiny. "Every aspect of the application is muddled to some degree," she says. "We know that grades are sometimes inflated and don't always mean what they seem. Do negative recommendations ever make it into the packet? Do we even need to talk about the fairness of the SAT? The whole thing is a doll with sawdust coming out of every seam."
One reason the essay stands out is that, along with the occasional interview, it is the chief means colleges have of divining students' personalities amid the faceless statistics of their applications. That is why some colleges have moved toward increasingly idiosyncratic questions like those made famous by the University of Chicago, which practically dare applicants to find existing essays on the Internet. An example from 1998:

Explain Dennis Rodman.
This past fall, Brown University began recommending that applicants provide copies of an essay from an SAT II exam, which are proctored and timed. "It provides us with a level of confidence that it was produced by the applicant without outside help," says Michael Goldberger, director of the office of admission. Brown will decide whether to formalize the option after next fall. William T. Conley, dean of undergraduate admission at Case Western Reserve University, thinks it is useful to "jog students' sense of ethics" and may consider a similar move. Although he worries that colleges might be "brewing needless hysteria" by focusing on the issue, he acknowledges the problem lurks "just below the surface." Last fall, an applicant to Case Western's preprofessional program in medicine submitted a strong essay that sparked the reaction "God, this is familiar." The student had received a 1450 on the SAT and was in the top 15 percent of his class, but teachers said he was weak in writing. Mr. Conley checked the university's files and found that the writer's sister, who was enrolled in the program, had written the identical essay just a year before. "That really hit us in the face," he says.
In a famous 1993 entrance essay to New York University, which was featured in Harper's, a student described a hyperbolic list of precollege feats, from "making 30-minute brownies in 20 minutes" to his ability to "pilot bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed." Last fall, Mr. Conley received a nearly identical piece from a student attending one of the top private schools in Manhattan.
"I couldn't believe it," he says. He wondered: If students were submitting such blatant examples of plagiarism, was more subtly packaged work coming in under the radar?
"Is the essay sacred anymore?" he asks.

This article from The Chronicle is available online at this address:

http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i25/25a03501.htm

Kami Amestoy Lee
College Counselor