With another Essentials guide to start the day, it is time to discuss one of the most important topics you will need to keep in mind on your journey to college acceptance: College Application services, particularly which ones are not trustworthy.

Far too often is this topic skimmed over, most probably because people are too trusting and naiive out of frustration and desperation during the admissions process. Unfortunately, many applicants are simply a click away from receiving a poorly written application from writers from India if they do not know how to choose the right services. That’s what we’re here to talk about, how to spot untrustworthy college application services.

Though we tend to have a distrusting stance on the College Confidential forum online, as most advice consists of overanxious students and severely vague instructors, they happen to hold a rather accurate stance on how to approach college application services. It goes something like this:

“The good ones tend to require high grades and strong SAT/ACT scores before they even begin to consider accepting your application for edits. The untrustworthy ones are rater self-explanatory. Cheap prices for cheap quality papers.

I know based on patterns I’ve seen through my years of working with clients that this is about half right; not that there is anything particularly wrong with the statement. The reason it is half wrong is because it simply does not cover every facet of trustworthy and untrustworthy college application services. It’s important to understand how to differentiate between the two when you are doing your shopping for the right college application services because it’s one of the primary determining factors to your college acceptance.

This will be a rather interesting topic for us to cover here at PenningPapers because it is a sort of brutal honesty that is as much shocking as it is useful. So buckle your seat belts and take out a pen and paper because we’re going to list some of the primary qualities that constitute services that are scams. (and the ones that close to scams but just not worth their price.)

College Application Services That Are Scams

The first thing we want to talk about is the myth that has been circulating College Application services for quite some time now. You can’t pay for services that claim to do parts of your application for you. College applications services are prohibited from actually writing the essay for their applicants; they can, however, give their clients edited versions of their essay as a product for them to use. This is a much simpler route without having to face the legal issues that entail untrustworthy and illegal college application services.

Let’s also talk about another myth. College applications services that harp on about guaranteed acceptances. These simply do not exist or are illegal. Opportunistic College Application consultants created a world for delusional wealthy families where they can get their children accepted into any school by having others do the work for them. They convince them of this so it’s easier to sell their product, their service. It’s easier for them to make money by spreading these rumors about how college application services are legal even if they go against the rules by forging scores or copying essays.

It’s not easy to write these truths down. We expect this to be major mental hard-wiring for many students –mostly parents—who wish for the best college application acceptance results. I’ve worked in this industry through my own private practice and have seen the ins and out of it; I’ve shifted through other companies who also provide college application services –guaranteed acceptance doesn’t exist.

It’s understandable to feel sick when hearing this, and most likely try out a service that looks fancy and trustworthy because it has shiny gurus, good price tags, or rake testimonials and college acceptance claims: those don’t work. There are as much helpful services as there are scams, but those don’t work.

There are far too many people who think of college applications as another writing assignment that can be paid for without any consulting or any prep from the client’s side to be successful. – it’s not.

Every consultancy, not just college application services, requires synergy and cooperation from both the client and the consultant or editor. College applications take serious effort. Even with the best college application services available, you need to be willing to put in the time to make it the best piece it could be. If you’re willing to work with a consultant instead of just throwing them a check and taking a vacation, you won’t regret the acceptance letters that come pouring in.

With that settled, here are the common attributes that show a college application service is a scam. We’ll describe each one in detail.

 

Signs a College Application Service is a Scam.

 

1. Unusually low prices: This usually goes for services that show rates such as 15-45 dollars for an entire college application. You will usually see this paired with incredibly cheap deals such as 50% off prices. Most companies that follow these pricing charts are scams that lure their clients in without telling them of their horrid return policy.
2. Unusually high prices: This is actually not as common but can still happen. More often than not, high prices do not mean 1000 to 3000 dollars; that range is actually quite average when it comes to editing services. What’s wrong with prices such as these is if and only if they provide half-decent to low quality services and hide them under titles such as editing services from ivy league graduates. It’s not a scam per se, but it is making use of a title to get away with low quality editing which essentially means throwing money into a pit.

Here’s an example: Some companies will charge 2500 – 3000 for an ivy league graduate to review or edit a client’s college application once for 1-3 hours. Normally, this time span works for consultations only, but an editing service for only three hours does little to no good. Whether they are ivy league graduates –most aren’t, but there are legitimate coaches out there—does not matter if they are only editing for 1-3 hours. There simply won’t be enough preparation and work done to make the college application look nice enough.

3. Fake stock photos as profiles: This is self-explanatory: If the site has coaches that use stock photos from other sites, they are most probably fake. You can usually tell if the photos of the guides are a little bit too attractive –as most stock photo models need to be attractive to begin with—but there are more concrete ways to find out if a site uses stock photos for their fake coaches. Here’s how:

–Right click on the photo of the coach or editor in question.

–Click from the drop-down menu “search Google for this image”.

–Look for carbon copies of the photo from the website which reveal the photo came from another site.

4. More than only a few Grammatical/ spelling errors in major parts of the site: If you see one or two grammatical mistakes in a service, that’s fine. There’s no need to fret. If, however, a company had spelled many names wrong or missed a lot of grammatical structures, you should consider being more cautious. Note, however, it may also simply mean that the site is new and has not gone through revisions yet.
5. Fake testimonials: It is rather difficult to determine whether a testimonial is fake or not but use number 3 of our list of common attributes in scams to determine it. If the testimonial reveals a fake photo or the author seems to write too well, it may be fake.
6. Guarantees: For obvious reasons, there is no way to guarantee whether you will enter a university through college application services. You can, however, guarantee that your chances of college acceptance will be much higher if you hire the right services. Do not trust the ones that claim to give you immediate or guaranteed acceptance. This does not seem to occur very often in websites on google; through our experiences in the field, however, we’ve come to notice these claims made by fake companies on social media sites such as Instagram and Wechat.
7. Fake ivy league alumni: Some college application services coaches will parade an ivy league university degree as their source of being a great writer/ editor for your essay. While this is mostly a good thing, very few coaches and editors actually come from ivy league backgrounds. To check for validation, you want to ask them if they may show proof of their certification. This is okay to do; you are investing your money and, more importantly, your precious time on finding the right person to edit your college application. Again, this can be done with a quick reverse google search, but you may want to check up on them by asking for proof through email or other forms of contact.

In the next article, we are going to check out which college applications services are trustworthy and what facets indicate their legitimacy. If you plan to hire college application services yourself, you may want to consider hiring expert consulting to map out the blueprint of your admissions plan.