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That thin line between being smart and cheating.

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Aw man, here we go again. Yet another post from EssaySnark on ethics. You’d think we’d get sick of hearing ourselves talk about this.

But no.

Because it matters.

Especially in this mixed-up world we’re living in now. Ethics really really matters.

In case you missed it, our title says:

That thin line between being smart and cheating.

But that title lies.

There is no thin line.

It’s a bright red line that is really easy to see, and even easier not to cross.

Admittedly, it may be a tiny bit confusing, when there’s admissions consultants like the ‘Snark out there, helping you with developing your strategy for writing your essays to bschool. When it’s so open and accepted for MBA applicants to work with admissions consultants, then that may send mixed signals.

It can also be confusing when the accepted wisdom for smart Brave Supplicants is to work openly with your recommenders, to talk with them about what they might want to write, to even suggest some possible ideas or do some brainstorming with them about your qualities and traits. To remind them of the things you worked on together and the ways you did impressive things on the job. That too may send mixed signals.

But actually the line is very clear on how to operate ethically in constructing your apps:

Nobody but YOU writes your essays.

Nobody but YOUR RECOMMENDER writes the recs.

There. Done. Nothing else to say!

Except….

We still hear of applicants who went ahead and drafted a letter of recommendation for their boss because he was really busy and he wouldn’t have done it otherwise. Or she doesn’t speak good English so this just seemed like the easiest way. Or culturally it’s not really common to have a manager write a recommendation, so the only way you thought you could get one was to do it yourself.

Or for certain international applicants who have doubts about their own English skills, to just outsource the task and have one of those academic essay writing services write things up. Or heck, there are even unscrupulous and no-morals so-called “consultants” out there who will just create your entire application out of whole cloth.

Dang, there’s even a Resume Writing Service available at a major website that explicitly advertises that they will write your resume for your MBA app.

Like, wha’?!???

THIS IS NOT OKAY, PEOPLE.

EssaySnark is probably most miffed at the so-called consultants and advisors who market their services to do this kind of stuff, because they are totally and completely unprofessional and absolutely gaming the system. Yes the applicants are at fault too — nobody should be misrepresenting someone else’s effort as their own. No, it’s not as bad as Photoshopping applicants’ heads onto the bodies of athletes, but damn, it’s not really that different.

It is FRAUD.

So, just a (not) gentle reminder, Brave Supplicant:

If you’re applying to business school, you need to do so based on a presentation of reality. Your own work. Your own essays.

Yes, you can get input, help, education, coaching from others. There are experts who know what to do, and what to avoid. Use them wisely.

But paying someone to write your drafts? Or writing recommendations for your own application? These both are big no-nos and if you’re found out, you will be rejected for this reason alone.

It’s the same as lying on your resume and making up jobs you never held or degrees you don’t have. It is unethical and WRONG. Don’t do it, grasshopper. Just don’t. There is no justification in the world that makes any of this right.

 
 
 

Also, how odd to be posting a regular ol’ post today. Here we are, talking about getting into bschool. On September 11th. Like the most significant day that most of us Americans have lived through in our entire lifetimes. And yet, so much time has now passed from that fateful day…. Weird, how it can be just another day on the calendar now.

 
 
 
 
 
 

Nobody sets out to be a bad person.

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Have you seen any of these Fyre Festival documentaries? Pretty incredible, how all of it went down. The entrepreneur dude who tried to pull it off is called a pathological liar. The most incredible part of all is, even after he got prosecuted by the FBI, he launched a totally new swindling scheme. Apparently his moral compass is calibrated a bit differently than our own.

These tales tend to be rife with irony.

Take the case of a journalist or nonfiction author who plagiarized and fabricates. Every so often we hear of such a case. A big incident happened in 2012 when science writer Jonah Lehrer’s books were pulled. It was discovered that he even made up Dylan quotes for his articles. He admits that his acts “caused deep pain” and he says he did it out of “arrogance”, “a willingness to take shortcuts” and “carelessness” — all reasons why we detest plagiarism. (The big irony of course is that those candid comments came from him during a speech he was paid $20k to give talking about decision-making.)

It’s really easy to get a certain smugness when sitting outside of the circle where such a thing happened. It’s easy to look with an eye of disdain upon the participants in the Fyre Festival fiasco. How could someone do that? How could you be so naive? Why didn’t you say something? How come you didn’t blow the whistle?

The thing is, it’s easy to get sucked in. You get a charismatic enthusiastic charmer and you can get swept away with an idea that, if you stepped back and gave it some distance, or put on your thinking hat, you’d easily recognize it wasn’t so brilliant.

Like all the nonsense with that elite colleges admissions scandal.

So today’s post is a reminder to poke your head out of the morass that it’s mired in, and make sure you’re keeping things on the straight and narrow.

(You’d think we were some type of morals-and-philosophy blog, the amount of time we spend on this stuff. But honestly, in the modern era of The World is On Fire!! we feel that it’s important to be public about these, well, important things.)

 
So here goes:

When you fill out your MBA applications, telling the truth is important.

Seems obvious — too obvious to even have to say it. But that’s how poor decisions are made.

It’s not that we expect BSers who come to the EssaySnark blahg will be trying to bribe admissions officers or sports teams to get in.

It’s more insidious than that.

You get some idea that you need to show the adcoms that you’re a really impressive candidate so you start making up career goals that you think “sound good” — like, you want to be a some CEO at some big corporation some day.

That’s not exactly a lie, since anybody can say anything about what they want to do in the future, and who knows, maybe you legitimately are aiming high. That’s not going to keep you out of bschool if everything else lines up well and you convince the adcoms about what you’ve done in the past that sets you a part. (Most schools really don’t want such long-term and lofty visions for a career goals statement, but that’s not the main point we’re trying to make today.)

Where things can get slippery is where you get a little creative with the facts of your past.

Maybe you tried to start some type of do-gooder organization at some point. You got together with a few friends and put the basic sketch of a plan together where you would launch a non-profit to raise money for underprivileged kids to pay for their school fees. A noble cause for sure! You had the best of intentions. But after about six months there was some disagreements with your buddies, and one of them took a new job and suddenly had no free time to devote to the project any longer, and you hit some walls in trying to get started. Nobody wanted to give you more than a few bucks. It was harder than you expected. The shine of the fresh idea started to wear and it became work instead of fun, and then it languished by the wayside of your life, and suffered the slow demise of yet another abandoned initiative. It still exists for you in concept, and it was something you always intended to go back to and revive, and make real, but you know it’s not a real thing that actually went anywhere.

Yet in your MBA apps, you have a section of your resume about it with dates coming into the present day, and in an essay you talk about this NGO that you started. You kinda sorta fail to mention that it floundered and never got off the ground.

That’s lying.

You really need to be telling the truth in your apps.

You realize that schools do background checks, right?

You don’t need to inflate your history — and it could easily backfire on you if you do.

Same deal with massaging the dates of employment to try and cover up a gap, maybe because you were laid off and are embarrassed about it. Or that you feel you don’t make enough money, so you round up (significantly). Or you’ve heard that it’s possible to make too much money and you don’t want that to keep you out of school.

You don’t need to lie to get into bschool. Really truly you don’t.

Yes the process of constructing your messaging in the applications requires some careful planning, and there’s an art to choosing what to say and definitely also how to say it. That’s part of what we mean when we say that you need to construct a pitch — it’s messaging and it’s being selective in what you share and the way you present it. (Pro Tip: This is why a) you need to plan for multiple drafts of every single essay, and b) getting the help of a qualified reviewer who knows how to pitch to a top MBA adcom is critical.)

If you’re talking to an admissions consultant who advises you to go ahead and apply to Columbia Early Decision as an “insurance policy” even if Columbia isn’t your first choice, then please consider carefully the ethics that this person is demonstrating. Just because an admissions consultant tells you it’s OK does not make it OK. Don’t leave your own morals outside the door when you enter into an agreement with any type of coach or advisor.

We believe in karma — to the extent that each and every decision you make affects you. You are the only person who has to live in your skin, inhabiting your life experience. Every time you cut corners or fudge the truth even just a little it decays your core. It takes the shine off your being. Do this often enough and you’ll end up a nasty person without even realizing how you got there. Maybe all that matters to you is your own success in whatever external way you’re defining it. But we would suggest that that’s not the recipe for true happiness in this life.

“Being careless is a choice; it’s choosing not to care.”
– Jonah Lehrer

Our annual reminder: Ethics matter. (aka: Early Decision at Columbia and Duke are binding)

by EssaySnark - Discusses Leave a Comment

Some of you may have guessed what we were alluding to in yesterday’s “What’s wrong with this picture?” post, but if not, here you go.

That person sounded like they were definitely headed to Booth, right? Based on how they related the results? Did you examine where else they applied and what their outcomes were?

You may have noticed the admit to the Columbia J-Term, and wondered if we were going to comment on that. Nope, that’s not the issue. The J-Term is not binding. The potential wrinkle is that this person also applied to Duke.

The results didn’t say, but Duke has a Round 1, and an Early Action. Early Action at Duke is like Early Decision at Columbia: They are both binding.

It’s totally possible that this applicant applied in Duke Round 1 with no strings attached. But just in case there are some people considering Duke EA along with their other schools in Round 1, or Columbia ED, we’d like to talk through the options you’re looking at.

We already posted about Columbia Early Decision at the end of June, so none of this is news. We spoke there about how it’s a binding process — but we know that this seemingly obvious stance on how to navigate decisions in life is not universally shared. There are many MBA admissions consultants out there who apparently have no qualms about advising their clients to act unethically. It’s not something we will ever be able to understand. 😕

From a purely practical level though, the advice is flawed from its foundation. The idea is this: Try for Columbia Early Decision. If you get in, then that means you have a chance at a better school, because clearly you did something right!

But actually, no.

Columbia Early Decision tends to be easier to get in through – marginally so, at least, and dependent upon many factors.

So the logic being proposed is: “I’m going to try clearing an easier bar, and that means I’ll have success at the harder one!”

Ummm, no.

It’s like saying you are going to send your resume out for jobs at the Manager level, and if you get a job offer, then you’ll accept that offer, and then immediately send your resume out for jobs at the Director level, to see what happens.

These are different playing fields entirely.

Maybe the issue is, you’re thinking about it a little bit off. Maybe you’re thinking of it like running.

You run a 5K as preparation for the marathon.

Does that analogy hold?

Well, kinda. If your goal with trying for Columbia first is to learn what’s required to put a good application together, then sure. Applying to Columbia and getting accepted means you did a good job on that.

But these two separate goals — getting into Columbia, versus getting into Harvard or Stanford — they require optimization on different dimensions.

What Columbia cares about in its applicants is really not the same as what Harvard or Stanford care about.

Sure, there are overlaps.

But making it to the end of a 5k isn’t that big of a deal. Heck, OutOfShapeSnark can do it.

Making it to the end of a marathon is a whole ‘nother beast.

They’d be scooping this ‘Snark up off the course at sundown if it were us that were trying it.

The execution of a 5k and a marathon are really quite different.

If you want to get into Harvard or Stanford or wherever, then apply to Harvard or Stanford. Getting into Columbia first does not say anything about whether those other schools will work out. It just says you got into Columbia.

* * *

 

While we understand the thinking with this strategy, to try for Columbia ED and then use that to determine trying for other schools, and while yes, we know people do it all the time, that does not make it right.

Just because other people do it does not mean it’s okay. Do you want to be like other people?

Here’s the real problem with the Columbia/Duke “early” app as a planned first step and a H/S/W/whomever later app in the works (in case our point has escaped you):

Columbia Early Decision is binding.

You would be giving your COMMITMENT to Columbia by applying through their Early Decision process.

Your commitment is your word. It’s about honor. It’s not about the money that you would forfeit by paying a deposit and walking away from it if another school lets you in. It’s about following through on a promise that you make. You can examine the text in the Columbia application and reflect on what you would be promising to them. It may feel trivial, but in our perspective, decisions on every level matter in life.

We have many posts about this:

There are actually more posts than that, in case you’re really into hearing us lecture, but those capture the gist of it.

Ethics are what let us live a noble life, one of honor and character. That’s what EssaySnark stands for, and we are always so inspired to work with others who share those values.

Oh hey wait.

“Values.”

Where have we heard that word before???

Oh that’s right. It’s what so many schools are saying they care about now.

And, the best part is: You don’t need to cheat in order to get in to Columbia!

If you have a solid profile, you’re going to have just as much shot at getting in through Regular Decision, if you apply at the right time and you present yourself effectively. Early Decision has been an advantage more so in highly competitive seasons. Which this season is unlikely to be (at least, not at that level). There is strategy involved, yes. There is execution required, yes. (Shameless plug: We go into all of this in our Columbia Essay Guide!!)

What could be a “weakness” for Harvard or Stanford is not even going to be noticed at Columbia — provided your essays are really strong, of course! Columbia cares a lot about the essays; the essays are very important there, regardless of which round.

This means that there isn’t much logic to the plan of trying for Columbia before trying for the others. That’s a common fallacy of a “trade-up strategy” and we just don’t see it work out that often. Admissions to each school is an independent event; the only reason that there is correlation between admits to multiple schools is based on underlying attributes in a profile, but the execution of each of those apps needs to be quite different in almost every case – and that’s ESPECIALLY true for the presentation of material for Harvard and Stanford compared to Columbia.
Someone who’s admitted to Harvard or Stanford, also being admitted to Columbia and MIT? Yes, absolutely, that’s going to happen all the time.
Someone admitted to Columbia or MIT also having a solid chance at Harvard and Stanford? No, sorry. Doesn’t work that way. Correlations fall apart when you move that direction.

Oh hey look! We cover this in multiple posts, too!

There have been several years in a row now where admissions was all whack. The adcoms didn’t know what to expect in terms of numbers of applications, and how many would matriculate. This year is likely to have some uncertainty associated with it, but unless there’s a major shock to the economy, we do not expect it to be anything like what’s been seen previously. In other words: It looks like things are more stable. Predictable. If you want to play a risky strategy and try “trading up” then there’s no harm in trying — but having a sound Round 1 strategy in place first is really important. That’s the conservative way to do it.

Try for your most important schools early. Then if they don’t pan out, figure out why, and go at it again in Round 2 with that learning under your belt.

If you’d truly be thrilled with an admit to Columbia and wouldn’t be tempted by other schools later, then go for Columbia Early Decision. If you cannot commit to them upfront, then don’t.

It’s not necessary, and every time we compromise our values, a little shadow darkens our souls.

 
 
The other takeaway message from that results post from yesterday: This is a GREAT TIME to be reapplying to bschool! With a forecast of a softer season ahead — especially if you’re trying in Round 1 — it could totally turn into a set of happy results like this other BSer racked up. Congrats to him from last year! Maybe you’ll be in a similar wonderful (difficult!) position of having to choose between great programs in a few months.

($) If you’re applying to bschool, should you waive your right to see your recs?

by EssaySnark

When they ask you on the app if you waive your right to view your records, should you say yes? This is not a consequential thing in the context of your actual app strategy. But it’s the type of thing that can cause applicants stress, and some recommenders may wonder about it, how it works,…

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($) “All the bschools seem to care about values now. What in heck are those, and do I even have any?!?”

by EssaySnark - Discusses , ,

Northwestern Kellogg has an MBA entire essay question asking about values this year, and Stanford has asked “What matters most” for years and years and years. Values-driven companies are more attractive to employees, and it’s becoming a prominent feature at many top MBA programs that values are examined and explicitly expressed as part of their…

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($) MBA admissions and background checks

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Different schools definitely do this differently, and not all schools even conduct background checks — but many of them do now and the process may seem intimidating. “Ohmygosh. They’re going to dig into my background. I have so many skeletons in my closet. What will they find?!?” Relax, Brave Supplicant. If you are an honest…

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Dang, we’re doing it wrong. (Except no not really)

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No joke, those were the first words that CynicalSnark uttered here in the office when we saw the news about this bust with all the arrests of the admissions consulting bribery ring .

Get super-rich clients whose parents will donate big bucks to the athletic team in order for the coach to find a spot? Well that seems like an easy way to help a kid make it into college!!!

Obviously CynicalSnark doesn’t run the show here at EssaySnark and obviously we care way too much about ethics to try and pull off anything like this (64 posts and counting in our “ethics” category of posts here on the blahg; that’s more than we’ve written about Tuck or Haas!!).

But this scandal exposes an unfortunate reality in the world of elite universities: Yes you can pay to play.

This is much more common in college admissions but we’ve seen it happen in MBA programs too: A well-connected alumnus/a makes a call. A substantial donation is made to a scholarship fund. A well-connected alumnus/a’s child is suddenly accepted.

We’ve even advised some clients of means to go that route when they really, really, really wanted to get in to a specific school and their profile was just too crappy to make it in (why are so many super-wealthy applicants’ GMAT scores so low??? hmmmm.) And yes, they made it in.

That’s not necessarily illegal but is it unethical? Seems like it, doesn’t it? From the schools’ perspective, why are they willing to prostitute themselves in that way? Or is the applicant the prostitute? Not sure which way the unpleasant metaphor lands, but paying for something like this in America is seedy at best. And yet, it’s done all the time.

Really hate that the system works that way, but it does. Nothing we can do about it. Many experts and analysts in the education field (and other admissions consultant) who have been interviewed about this college admissions scandal have said that they don’t expect things to change. Not really.

What happened in specific in this case is, for example at Stanford, the coach of the sailing team was approached by this admissions consultant on behalf of the consultant’s clients. His clients were these wealthy parents who wanted their kids to go to Stanford. The consultant had set up a non-profit for the parents to donate to, and the consultant was offering to make a donation to the Stanford sailing team as a quid pro quo: Stanford sailing gets the money, and the coach somehow is able to find a spot for the kid on his team — even though the kid did not sail and did not even qualify as an athlete.

This happened in schools across the country with athletic teams who were not seen as stars of campus, the niche rich-kid sports like tennis, crew and water polo — to the tune of $25 million over the years.

And oh yeah: As of today, Stanford doesn’t have a sailing coach. The coach who facilitated these pay-for-play deals there was fired and he’s facing jail time. Other coaches have been placed on leave, and the schools are “investigating.” Yeah, maybe they should’ve investigated earlier? Isn’t it suspicious when so much money arrives out of nowhere like that, especially when it was sometimes tied to the admits of multiple kids from the same family? Not only were there people in the schools actively involved in this and justifying their actions, but there must’ve been many many others who suspected something foul and looked the other way.

And just ‘cuz it’s so damn juicy and brazen, we’ll crib this image of a transcript of the call courtesy of the WaPo:

The other part of the scandal of course is paying someone to take a test for your kid. And to that we say 😯

The most heartbreaking thing?

If you read through the transcripts of calls between actress Felicity Huffman and the “admissions consultant” dude who was orchestrating these scams, her second daughter wanted to get in on her own. The older daughter used the SAT test-center scam where her test results were “corrected” by someone on the inside of this ring, and presumably was able to use her artificially improved score to make it into a good school. The younger daughter was “academically driven” says Ms. Huffman on the call and wanted to take the test at least twice on her own. Yet her mom was meddling in it and arranging cheating on her behalf — when it sounds like the daughter didn’t want her to. 🙁

Dang, parents. WTF?

How do you think your kid’s gonna feel their whole life when they know that they only got in to fancy-pants college because their parents PAID for it? That’ll send you to therapy later on.

At least in this situation, the court docs say that the daughter did not use the test-cheater’s services. Good for you, second Huffman daughter!!

The way we see it, all of this boils down to the issue of wealthy people thinking the rules don’t apply to them, and the very slippery slimy lack of ethics that follows from that. There are hucksters and scammers in every part of life and everyone is trying to play the game. It may seem like there were no victims in this scheme; it would’ve been really easy for an individual parent to justify these actions. After all, for the sports-donation side, they could feel holy and righteous in making a big donation that they otherwise would not have done, that enabled the school to do more for that underappreciated sport. (Those poor water polo players, nobody gives them any love.)

Yeah. No. Nope nope not.

This is a case where that kid from the cheating family got a spot where some other kid who was working hard and trying to make it on her own merits did not.

That SUCKS.

Hate it hate it hate it all the way to the parade.

So no, we’re not doing it wrong. We believe in the perhaps naive-sounding American dream, where you work hard and you get places in life. Maybe that’s all a charade, a trick played on the lower and middle classes to trap them, with all those rich 1%ers laughing into their tea. Dunno. We’re not in that group. Plenty of former BSers are but you probably are not.

What we know is that hard work makes you happy, and EARNING your place in life lets you sleep at night.

So that’s where we end up on all of this.

Thoughts? Comments? Shock and horror that this is going on? Lay it on us in the comments if you want to share your opinions.

Will the system change? No, not fundamentally. It’s how capitalism works. The schools are selling elitism — not an education.

That’s why we’re so meh about rankings in the first place.

That problem is too big for us to solve.

So all we can do is say, values matter, and that’s how we choose to live.

You’ll make your own choices in life. When you’re in the rich 1% class, hopefully you’ll remember and keep that moral compass in good working order.

 
 
 

PS: USC seemingly cannot get a break. They have had scandal after scandal after scandal in the past few years. We do NOT currently recommend USC to any applicants for any program, whether MBA at Marshall or otherwise. There is something rotted there.

 
 
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Harvard Business School is….

by EssaySnark - Discusses Leave a Comment

…. changing their data?!?!????

What is this?

EssaySnark keeps tabs on things like app volumes and GMAT scores reported by all the top schools, as a way to track trends in the industry and see what schools are currently in favor among applicants and which ones may be the “sleeper school” that can be surprisingly easy to break into — and which schools are actively working to make improvements to their offering, and which might be coasting a bit. Data is just what we do.

We’ve recently been pleased to see some schools be more forthcoming with more kinds of data about their student body, including a newish development of admissions teams disclosing GRE data on accepted applicants, and at a few schools, even some greater transparency in how many underrepresented minorities are in their incoming class. NYU has been particularly generous with publishing data, and a few other schools including Yale, Cornell, and others have also given more insight into their class on these helpful dimensions.

So needless to say, this is stuff we tend to track.

Imagine our surprise last week when we discovered some weird-a@@ discrepancies in the data we’ve captured over the years, compared to what Harvard Business School’s website was now showing.

Here’s what it WAS…

HBS Class of 2015 data: as reported in Dec 2018

 

And here’s what their website has just been updated to…

HBS Class of 2015 data: as reported in Jan 2019

Say wha’?

Where did those additional 371 applications come from???

That was enough of an increase that it pushed the admit rate to 11% from 12%.

Where were these mysterious new applications hiding?

Were these a stack of files that had slipped behind some admissions director’s file cabinet and were only now uncovered when they moved offices?

Like what is UP with this?

This is one reason why we couldn’t in good conscience give HBS the Radcom of the Year Award last week. (That went to MIT, in case you were wondering.)

At first we thought maybe they had changed their reporting methodology and had previously excluded the HBS 2+2 applicants from the count of standard full-time applicants, and decided to retroactively put them together…. but this theory was debunked when we consulted our trusty database of school stats and were reminded that Harvard has been getting well over 1,000 applications for 2+2 every year since at least 2015. An increase of <400 is way too small to be representing this pool. They also are now reporting higher enrollment for the Class of 2015, from 1,838 to 1,865. Where did these 27 students come from? How had they been overlooked before? And how did these 27 new students cause the yield to increase from 89% to 91%? A school's "yield" is how many of the admitted applicants end up accepting the school's offer of admission and matriculate. Harvard has long had the highest yield in the industry, wavering only between 89% as a low and 91% as a high for ages and ages (with the exception of one outlier year, the Class of 2012, which our data show was 84% -- unless HBS is going to be restating their numbers of that one, too). The next-highest yielding school is Stanford and they typically only get like 84%, which is still a remarkable number of course. If you get into Stanford, you're likely going to go to Stanford -- unless you also got into HBS, or you go to tell your boss that you're going to bschool and she throws bucketloads of cash at you to get you to stay. Anyway. Back to Harvard and this data update. You sharp-eyed observers will have noted that it's not only the Class of 2015; they also updated the Classes of 2016 and 2017. We do know that for perhaps the first time in a generation, Harvard is feeling pressured from the competition of other MBA programs -- at least, to an extent. There aren't that many schools out there that can really claim to be peers of Harvard. If someone gets into HBS and Kellogg, it's 99% probability they choose HBS, even if Kellogg offers a sh!t-ton of scholarship money. Stanford and Wharton are really only the main players that are true contenders for this same set of applicants. It's never wise to sit on your laurels; there are plenty of case studies being taught at Harvard Business School that caution against hubris and the dangers of myopia that come with a leadership position. Stanford doesn't seem all too concerned about Harvard, though Wharton seems to have made it their mission to become the "best" business school as ranked by the well-known publications. Should Harvard be worried? Is that why they've revisited the numbers they reported and massaged the dataset being published on those recent classes? Who knows what's going on behind the scenes or where these newly-discovered students came from. Harvard is making a big push with their HBS Online initiative (formerly called HBX CORe) which is a real money-maker for the school. We've even had to comment on some questionable messaging they've used: https://twitter.com/EssaySnark/status/1069986689492357120 On the increasing numbers in their historical dataset: Yes, we realize that we could contact HBS admissions and ask what the deal is. But honestly, if you're restating your numbers on something so fundamental to how your organization is run, shouldn’t you at least put a darn asterisk on the page and explain it?

Or maybe nobody is supposedta notice or care.

Dunno. Leaves a bad taste in the mouth though.

We get enough reasons to distrust The Man today. Apparently EssaySnark was living under the illusion that the word “veritas” is supposed to mean something.

($) You cannot write your own letters of recommendation.

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Nor, honestly, should you want to do so. Almost every time, what other people write about you (provided that they’ve been appropriately selected for the task) will be oodles more appealing and useful to the adcom – nay, even more POSITIVE and glowing – than what you would come up with about your own bad…

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($) Ethics and your MBA apps – 2018 edition

by EssaySnark

So enough of the philosophical musing about what is ethics and the handwringing about what we should do when faced with massively unethical behavior from a client. Let’s bring this full circle and focus on the practical: In what way will ethics play a part in your MBA applications? Essay Questions First and foremost, we…

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