Cheating - and personal statements

[dumbledore345]

Just spoken to a number of parents with DC entering Y13. All were discussing their DC draft personal statements - how they were pushing them to get started, helping them to decide what to include, and one parent was hoping to discuss hers (sic) with a relative who happens to be an admissions tutor.
I would love to believe that staff at Universities can see through this and distinguish b etween personal statements that have been written by the applicant and those written by their parents.But I am not convinced.
Am I right in thinking that this is just as much cheating as helping DC with course work, getting advance notice of questions?

Your classification is nothing more than prejudice on your part, unless you have been able to use a reliable independent source of information to confirm your guess, both ways.

We do! Do you really think admissions tutors don't do that .

That formulaic PS you outline I have found is actually more likely to be one the applicant has written themselves - it's really standard (I agree it says nothing about them) and often found on 'how to write a PS' websites.

it's the 'I spent last summer walking the Pilgrim Path in order to fully understand Chaucer's motivations...' ones that are more likely to be written by someone else!

I'd like to know how you verify the author of each PS...

-love English because love reading
- Here are some books I love reading (all on the A level syllabus, with maybe one or two classics thrown in)
- Here is what I want to do after I graduate - publishing/media/journalism
- I am grade 8 on the piano and have my DofE gold award.

Hate to burst your bubble, FuckingLoveCarbs but as a Year 13 Form Tutor for the past 9 years, I can assure you that those statements are always written from a student who has written their first draft and has not been coached or advised.

You have confirmed to me though that I have been giving the correct advice over the years, to avoid those kids of bland statements and that my coaching has worked!

Apparently discovering your love of Chemistry in a garden shed at the age of 8yo when an experiment went wrong was a frequent repeated story on PS at one point.

You mean passion witchend!

On the internet, nobody knows you're an admissions tutor ;-)

DS is unlikely to apply for university from school as he doesn't know what he wants to do or be and we (old, and hoping to retire rather than paying more fees) think he should try to find that out first. The PS he may write in five years time is going to be much more compelling because then he will know what he WANTS to do.

We (RG, Law) read every PS, unless the academic qualifications are obviously not what we want - I think we owe it to the candidate to read the PS they've spent time on. However, it is fairly rare, but not impossible, for an otherwise qualified applicant to not get an offer due to a weak PS - if it happens, the PS is usually appalling (no reference to the subject at all; dreadful spelling and grammar).
On the other hand, every year a handful of candidates owe their place to a good PS, because they missed their grades and we had to select between 'near misses' and the PS caused them to edge it.
For me, I'm less worried about the style of the PS and more about the content. The big problem with Law PS's is too much attention on the profession and not enough on the subject. We want some attempt to show that they know what the academic study of law is about. If they submit a draft to their school and are told to go away, read around a bit and think more about the academic subject and write about that, so much the better - in some ways, knowing that a student has gone through that process to produce the PS is the most important thing, rather than the finished article.
My pet hate is PSs which list the A levels studied and what skills each of those involves. A personal statement needs to be personal - all that tells me is you are a person who's studied those A levels.