Your Kids’ College Competition Can’t Write

Do you worry that your kids aren’t good enough writers? Are you concerned that by the time they get to college, they won’t have the skills to write papers that will help them pass their courses? If so, don’t worry.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t teach your kids to write well. It’s an important skill to have. But maybe you shouldn’t worry so much, because according to this writer, the competition isn’t too tough. In fact, he says that unless they have a lot of money to pay term paper writers, the competition can barely put a sentence together.

This man writes term papers for a living. College students buy them from him and claim them as their own. He says it’s big business, and that many, many students pass their college classes this way. How depressing is that?

By the way, he claims that college students in one specific course of study provide him with more work opportunities than any other:

I, who have no name, no opinions, and no style, have written so many papers at this point, including legal briefs, military-strategy assessments, poems, lab reports, and, yes, even papers on academic integrity, that it’s hard to determine which course of study is most infested with cheating. But I’d say education is the worst. I’ve written papers for students in elementary-education programs, special-education majors, and ESL-training courses. I’ve written lesson plans for aspiring high-school teachers, and I’ve synthesized reports from notes that customers have taken during classroom observations. I’ve written essays for those studying to become school administrators, and I’ve completed theses for those on course to become principals. In the enormous conspiracy that is student cheating, the frontline intelligence community is infiltrated by double agents. (Future educators of America, I know who you are.)

Remember that the next time you hear someone say that only parents with teaching degrees should be allowed to homeschool…..

5 thoughts on “Your Kids’ College Competition Can’t Write”

I agree with you–most homeschooled kids that I know write at a level far above their peers. I have a Master’s degree in English and have taught at both the secondary and college levels. I have seen lots and lots of student writing and know how bad the majority of it is. For that reason I have been very surprised that my home educated son, who is a great writer, has done only passingly well on the essay portions of his college entrance tests. He comes home thinking he has done okay. He writes better than 90 percent of the students I have ever taught. And yet his composition scores on the ACT and SAT were average. I know what these tests are looking for and I have prepared him to write for them accordingly. He has done many practice essays with excellent results. This is going to sound like parental rationalization, but I really think it may have something to do with his poor handwriting, exacerbated by neuropathy that has developed in the last year or two. I wish now I had requested some sort of adaptation for him to take these tests. I don’t even know if there is such a thing. But I think if he could have typed his essays he would have scored higher. I think the readers probably looked at his labored handwriting and read his opening and closing sentences and decided he was an average writer, assigned a grade, and moved on to the next essay.

This is a very scary thought! I am one of those that worry about my children’s writing. This lit a fire under my behind.

Cheryl, I think you’re probably right. I knew someone who corrected those writing tests (a recent college grad who couldn’t find work in their field) and it didn’t sound like they looked too closely at those essays. It’s likely someone made an assumption instead of really reading what was there, which is certainly unfair to your son. Seems like asking for an adaptation is worth pursuing–good luck!

Carol, don’t worry. Just give them lots of opportunities to write about what interests them.

Thanks for stopping by, ladies! 🙂