Buying Essays in English with Money

A banker, Mr. Lee (29), who is planning to apply to an MBA program of a US college, recently custom made 5 ‘excellent essays’ for 3 million won through an ‘essay agent.’ An essay is a kind of study plan, and it is a mandatory document for application.

Mr. Lee said, “Many American colleges think that there are bubbles in the GMAT or TOEFL scores of Asian students, so they put more emphasis in essays,” and “therefore, I am paying attention to the essay score.”

Facing the studying-abroad and getting-a-job season, the ‘excellent essay’ tutoring is booming. The demand of tutoring for writing better essays needed for not only TOEFL, SAT, LSAT, or GRE for studying-abroad to British and American colleges but also self-introduction letter, study plan, reference letter, and resumes are increasing in big scale.

The ‘excellent essay’ companies have started to be founded in areas near the Gangnam Station and Samsung Dong of Seoul, where studying-abroad agencies are concentrated, and around 10 of those have been founded since last year.

In case of E agency, it first gives ‘consulting’ to students applying to MBA programs. Among the consultants, there are several foreigners from local companies and law firms of America. The students talk about their life experiences, and then the consultants organize their potentials, leaderships, and future plans in ‘essay forms,’ and make them write those in Korean. And after that, translating agents fix them exquisitely in English. The ‘outside order fee’ of those procedures is around 700,000 won per essay (5 sheets).

For the ‘professors` reference letters,’ another agent translates and adds more, so extra fee is needed. Some of the US colleges are known to object if the writing style of the applicant and the referencing professor are same.

Some of the agencies are contracting with American college students from famous US universities like Stanford, Columbia, and Harvard. Those agencies request extra 100,000 won per sheet of 900 words from students for ‘remote proof-reading’ through the Internet.

Under these atmosphere, the excellent essay tutoring is being popular as much as ‘waiting in line’ especially in January and February. It is the application season of foreign universities and graduate schools which start in September. Even in the case for students who are already in foreign universities, students, who need to write 2, 3 papers a month like in British colleges, are known to receive the ‘remote tutoring’ through the Internet.

Mr. Jerry Park (32), who graduated from the Philosophy Department of the Oxford University and works at an ‘excellent essay’ agency, said, “For entering a foreign graduate school or companies, there should be consistency in self-introduction letter, essay, and interview, so, in most cases, the ‘English interview tutoring’ go abreast with those.”

In the English education circle, they point out that the reality of absence in writing education has produced these ‘new breed of tutoring.’ Professor Peter Kip of the ‘English Correction Center’ in the Ewha Womans University said, “Although Korean students are not behind of the British and American students in technical aspects of sentences such as structures of introduction, development, and conclusion or correct sentences in diction; however, the content that is complex and without point is the problem,” and “systematic practice not for simple ‘translation into English,’ but for ‘writing suitable for the purpose’ is needed.”

Experts pointed out that if even uniformed essays were sent to American colleges following the debate of submission of similar answers in paper exams such as TOEFL, the confidence of application materials submitted by Korean students might be lost all together.

In-Jik Cho cij1999@donga.com