BS, Fake News, and Words: Who do you believe?

I totally bullshitted my Stanford essays (all final drafts written under an hour). How did I get in?

This question was originally posted on the website Quora.com

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The problem with affirming, in your question, that you are a bullshitter is that it is hard know if you have stopped bullshitting or not. Your 1 hour claim is stretching my willing suspension of disbelief to its limits. Really? 1 hour? Mirabile dictu.

Stanford asks all applicants to write quite a bit, far more than just one essay. Is it possible to crank through it all in 1 hour? Possible, just not likely. I personally know one who got into Stanford after focusing for slightly over 1 week on her essays over winter break. But while the essays were quite good, it helped she was THE top student at a school the Wall Street Journal once called the best in the world, had virtually perfect testing on lots of tests, and was a superior writer in a special program for gifted students that extended back several years. If you are this kind of star, then it’s possible you did what you said you have done. Still, the acceptance rate at Stanford is 5%. They look for stuff that is not great so they can find a reason not to accept many wonderful students (this is slight hyperbole but not by much). Bullshitty essays usually are more than enough to earn a no.

If you wrote your essays in one hour there are a couple of reasons I can think of about how you still might have gotten in:

1. You are a member of a group Stanford wants to recruit. At the top of the list are athletes. Recruited athletes are, if they have signed a letter of intent, already getting in, even before the “official” decisions have been made and even before some of these athletes have filled out an application. No one is going to spend much effort evaluating a student who is a signed athlete unless they just want to have fun and read the application of a future or present Olympian.

Another group you might belong to that might have permitted you to have submitted a less than good essay would be what are called development cases (dad’s given 50 million).

Most people think legacies can be slackers and still get in to top universities. It ain’t so, unless they are big donors. Legacy applicants get in at a higher rate but their testing and overall performance is still quite strong and this usually goes for essays although they don’t have to be publication worthy.

Other special talent: if you are the math Olympiad winner in the world and have a background that indicates you are a genius or future Nobel laureate then a less than stellar essay is probably fine.

2. You had a gimmick. There was one well publicized case last year of a student who thought about how to answer the essay prompt and that was what worked—writing Black Lives Matter 100 times: His application essay for Stanford? Writing #BlackLivesMatter 100 times. He got in.

3. You really are in touch with your inner bullshit monster. Most writers will tell you writing is just damn hard: As Hemingway said: "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed,". You could take this in two ways. If you really had a sob story that didn‘t need much structure, then maybe that could have done the trick (negotiating for father’s release from kidnappers got one student I know into some great schools). But for most writing well is hard, really hard, and takes lots of drafts.

But maybe you are one of those genetic anomalies and you can just draw from the deep well of words without ever worrying about running out. Mozart could do this with notes; maybe you can do it with words. I still marvel at how some writers like Faulkner and Hitchens could crank out pages and pages of exceptional prose while drunker than most well ever get. Some have done the same on speed (Dylan), or other recreational pharmaceuticals (Hunter Thompson), but honestly I am just not convinced you really did this. I have many years of experience working with students who have applied to highly selective schools and it is very rare to see anyone do something in a day let alone an hour.

Can you prove me wrong and identify yourself and post your essays? Or if that is not ok, then send them along to me as a message along with your whole application packet and I can tell you why in private. I would enjoy knowing the one person who did what you did and succeeded when so many spend months or years thinking about essays and applications.

And just so you know, I wrote all this in less than an hour. Or did I?

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“Bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.” Harry Frankfurt

Maybe it’s because as soon as I wake up each day I open up my various online subscriptions. It is now impossible to avoid something being called fake or someone being identified as liar within the first few seconds. Most of these assertions have to do with things far weightier than an admission essay that an anonymous poster has said was bullshit and that got him into Stanford. But getting into college is not nothing. I would say it is fake news to assert that what college one attends does not affect life outcomes. Statistically and experientially, it does.

I very much doubt that the message that some might come away with after reading the words of the person who asked the question at the top of this blog entry would be that making stuff up and doing so at the last minute is a strategy to use to get into the most selective universities in the US. Nevertheless, what some readers might come away with is that the decisions that highly selective schools make are, if not arbitrary, are to a too great degree, subject to gaming by those who know how to bullshit. I f have no doubt every campus has a few students walking around and eventually graduating who lied or got some tone to write their essay or they simply talked about stuff they really didn’t know much about but felt it would help their case. But not many. The data submitted- grades, curses, testing, recommendations, activities, and in some cases interviews (I wish more schools would use these), to help provide support for the things people write about in the essay portion of the application. Most of the essays that I have read from successful applicants are clearly polished. They. Have the verbal sheen that domes form having been rewritten and edits and rewritten. Some are artistically artless and a few artlessly artistic but most do not smell of cow dung. The cliché about things passing the smell test is applicable here. Most essays submitted to schools pass the smell test. They don’t give  off a rank aroma like someone just jotting thoughts down in an hour or creating a smelly self that should be shelved in the fiction section. Some are true works of art, but now many? Only a small percentage of essays make a huge difference-either in a good or bad way.  They are one part of a much broader set of data points and I think this is as it should be. Language, both words and numbers, are what we use to shape and create the world and ourselves. We make judgements as a result. I would like to hear what readers of this post think about my words—did I pass the smell test? I hope so.