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New site offers college essays, sans plagiarism

[1]
There is one counselor for every 500 students in U.S. public schools.

Being the first in his family to graduate from high school, Paris Wallace said he sympathizes with teenagers who find themselves alone in the circuitous college application process, and he hopes a new online service called the Essay Exchange can help those students get an acceptance letter this spring.

The Essay Exchange [2], launched last August, has a repository of about 700 essays written by current students and college graduates who shared their successful written works for $2 apiece.

For between $2 and $5, a prospective student can scroll through the essays and get a feel for the structure and subject matter that helped get another student into a college or university.

The Essay Exchange, Wallace said, isn’t for students whose parents can afford pricey SAT preparation courses or counselors who tell students which classes to take throughout high school. The site was created to help students “compete on a level playing field” with their more affluent counterparts.

“I didn’t really know what I was getting into, so I was just kind of flailing,” said Wallace, who applied to 17 schools after he finished high school in 2000. “My college search was very much self directed. … I didn’t have any idea what a good college application looked like.”

There’s a growing market for any service that promises help for students navigating the application process. There is only about one counselor for every 500 public high school students in the U.S., according to the American School Counselor Association [3].

In states like Minnesota, California, and Arizona, that ratio reaches about one counselor per 800 students.

Wallace and web site co-founder Rory O’Connor—both graduates of Amherst College in in Massachusetts—took several steps [4] to ensure educators don’t label the Essay Exchange a cheat site, such as CollegePaper.org [5], an online service that sells completed essays and features the tagline, “Intelligence made easy.” [5]

Students have to sign the Essay Exchange’s plagiarism policy [6] before they can download material from the site; it’s the same anti-cheating pledge used by more than 100 colleges and universities.

The site’s co-founders also work with campuses to detect any plagiarism with the help of online programs and software designed to sniff out the practice.

O’Connor said he has invited college admissions officials to compare submitted essays to the web site’s essay options.

“There’s inequality in admissions … and we just want students to learn what has worked for other students who have been through the application process,” said O’Connor, a 2009 Amherst graduate. “We want to be proactive about it and reach out directly [to colleges] so they know we’re legitimate.”

Before college hopefuls find the essay—or group of essays—that will provide a valuable example, they can select an author based on a wide range of criteria.

Applicants can choose their authors based upon the university they were accepted to, their race, gender, family income, high school grade point average, and a host of other categories. Once the criteria are selected, the Essay Exchange will present available essays, along with the first three sentences of each entry.

Some admissions experts are skeptical of any web site that gives students access to application essays, however good O’Connor’s and Wallace’s intentions.

Jon Reider, an admissions officer at Stanford University from 1985 to 2000, said that while the Essay Exchange might give students some idea of what has worked for other students, a solid application essay is deeply personal and can’t be learned by reading successful works.

“The essay is read as part of a file, and it has to be about this person’s experience,” said Reider, who now works as the director of college counseling at San Francisco University High School [7]. “The essay, disembodied from everything else, cannot stand on itself.”

Essay examples found on the internet and in books on the subject, Reider said, are often perfectly structured and well written, but also “gimmicky and clever, rather than profound.”

“A good essay is found by digging into yourself and finding what there is in you that’s different and interesting and worth telling,” he said. “A really good essay has to be unusual in some way.”