University students received an e-mail last week from Maurie McInnis, associate dean of the College, cautioning them of the potential honor implications of an online service called The Essay Exchange. The service, founded last year by a startup company called Acceptional, allows current students to make their successful admissions essays available to prospective students seeking a guide for their own writing. The Essay Exchange pays contributors $2 every time one of their uploaded essays is viewed by an applicant, and already it features essays from 25 top-tier universities across the country.
With the University among that group, questions have been raised about the service's merits and whether it undermines the academic integrity the honor code is meant to uphold. Students should not merely accuse The Essay Exchange founders of embracing questionable ethics in pursuit of profit or criticize the University administration for a reactionary response to the service's appearance on Grounds. Instead, they can work to level the playing field in the admissions process through methods that are more effective and more prudent than simply providing completed essays to current applicants.
The Essay Exchange is meant to assist "students [who] don't have the access to writing instruction and college counseling" that can improve the quality of their writing, co-founder Rory O'Connor said. Whereas students from private schools and well-funded public schools often receive in-class instruction and guidance about the admissions process, those at underprivileged schools tend not to have access to such services. Additionally, only students who are on sound financial footing can pay the average of $3,700 to hire a private college counselor. Even more broadly, O'Connor said, "There's a lot of transparency in the other aspects of the [admissions] process. You know you need to get A's and you need to get 'x' SAT scores to get into a given school. But generally it's unclear as to what a strong essay is." The Essay Exchange hopes to address this by providing current applicants with previously successful essays that can serve as a resource for understanding the expectations of various admissions offices.
The theory behind this approach is hardly novel - dozens of books featuring high-quality admissions essays from past students are available in bookstores and even in the University's own libraries. That these books have been accessible for years without causing much of a stir suggests concerns about The Essay Exchange are somewhat overblown. This is particularly true given that The Essay Exchange has taken steps to protect against academic fraud by preventing users from downloading or copy-pasting the text of the essays and by confirming all of the essays hosted by the service are in the database of Turnitin, a plagiarism detection website.
Nevertheless, students should think twice about whether The Essay Exchange truly is the best way to help students in the college admissions process. As McInnis pointed out, "Trying to mold your essay to match others is not the best way to prepare yourself to get into a select college." Rather, the qualities that make a student worthy of admission to the University stretch beyond writing ability or academic prowess to include an originality of character and a sense of self-confidence. Attempting to reveal these characteristics through an essay modeled after a predecessor's runs counter to this, and University students should not think they are helping applicants by potentially misleading them into thinking otherwise.
At the same time, Acceptional should be commended for its efforts to experiment with other approaches to online college counseling. Apart from The Essay Exchange, O'Connor outlined the potential creation of a peer-to-peer service in which college students could answer the questions of applicants and offer advice through video chats, e-mails and text messages. He also indicated Acceptional was looking to lower the price of private counseling services by creating "a marketplace for these counselors
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