I hate cheating...

It's always been a big pet-peeve of mine. One of my favorite professors in college started each course with a speech about how he wouldn't tolerate any cheating, and would in fact do everything in his power to get a cheater expelled. So I was interested to read Jay Mathews' ideas for reducing cheating on college essays. I was disappointed in his suggestion, though because it puts the cheater right in their comfort zone-- cheating in their own high school.

10 Ways to Fix College Admissions

By Jay Mathews

Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 11, 2006; 9:48 AM

It is mid-July. College campuses thunder with the sound of high school students and their parents touring dorms, questioning admissions officers and sampling cafeteria food before they decide which schools to apply to.

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3. Write college essays in class

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The college application essay "editing" industry has gone too far. Students can now send in a few hundred random words and get back, for less than $100, a very polished essay written by an Ivy League graduate. And some parents just cannot resist rewriting whatever their child has done. The colleges should require that the essays be written in class, with the teachers signing the papers saying they were done in their presence without anybody's help, and sending them directly to the counseling office for mailing to the college. Quality 3, Likelihood 2.

There are a few flaws with this idea. First, it puts a burden on schools that schools will bear differently. Some kids may be limited to a single class period to write, while others are given expansive amounts of time-- as any writer knows, editing is huge, so the amount of time allowed to write will greatly effect the quality of the work. Some will have access to word-processor (a must for anyone with lousy handwriting), and others won't. It's true that life isn't fair, and some kids are going to have easier access to resources, no matter what, but tipping the application process even further against them is lousy. If allowed to write outside of school, many more kids would be able to find a computer to use, either at the library or at someone's home.

Second, the committed cheater probably won't be fazed. All they'd need to do is smuggle a pre-written essay into the classroom to copy over. I imagine that not every teacher would be thrilled to have college essay proctoring added to their schedule, so they won't all do a great job babysitting.

Third, some schools and teachers will cheat. There are high schools that get a lot of prestige from the college placement of their alumni, and they may decide to take a lawyerly approach to defining what "written without help" means.

I have my own suggestion for how to reduce cheating on the college application essay. During orientation, require that each incoming student write an essay on a surprise topic in a uniformly proctored setting. These essays can be compared to the ones submitted with their application, and if they don't seem to have been written by the same person, based on quality of writing and grammar, the acceptance is rescinded. It wouldn't catch everyone, but it would weed out the worst offenders. An additional advantage to this approach from my point of view is that homeschoolers wouldn't need a special accomodation to participate.