I'll start by saying that I feel incredibly honored to have so many students share their applications with me after I posted on r/IntlToUSA. I met over Zoom with students from over 25 countries on six continents, including multiple refugees from Ukraine and a child of genocide survivors in Rwanda. The resilience and creativity of some of these students was inspiring. I don't envy the job of admissions officers in granting or denying educational opportunities to these aspiring college students, many of whom are downright brilliant. My task was much more limited: look for "red flags" that might tank their whole application.

Last year I posted about common mistakes I saw international students make. I continued to see those. My observations here in this post are not necessarily things that are common, but which happened to catch my attention this week for various reasons.

A few US-based students also signed up, and some of their experiences created an interesting contrast.

General Style and Formatting

• Lots of ChatGPT, particularly in endings. Plenty of "I realized that X is not just about Y, but also about Z" along with long, repetitive conclusions full of tricolons and em-dashes. Some were egregious enough to be an immediate red flag.

  • One student claimed to have written their essay and just had ChatGPT proofread it, but I asked them to share the chat thread in which they "refined" the essay, it turned out that ChatGPT wrote it from scratch and the student just iterated it a few times with different Common App essay prompts and a few personal details.
  • One of my own clients got a little lazy this week and had ChatGPT write a conclusion to her essay, which I called out and told her to re-write.
  • But I encountered just one "tapestry"!

• Inconsistent curly and straight apostrophes and quotation marks. This is a red flag only if in the specific ChatGPT pattern of straight quotation marks and apostrophes for contractions but curly apostrophes for possessives, but it can also be caused by Grammarly and other tools, or just general lack of attention to detail.

• Inconsistent use of American and British/Indian spelling (e.g. "organize" vs. "labour" - and no, they weren't Canadian). This isn't a red flag unless the same word is spelled two different ways.

• A really odd one I've never seen before: using «European quotation marks» along with standard English ones. And this person was from Asia, not France or anywhere else that uses them.

Edit: I was unaware that this is the convention in China. I've had students from several Asian countries but but not Mainland China.

ECs

• Cramming as much information as possible without leaving any spaces whatsoever (reflects poor editorial discretion and general inability/unwillingness to think creatively)
• Trying to pass off helping a family short-term rental business a few hours a week as a job with a fancy title (and not mentioning that it's family-owned, something I figured out pretty easily)
• 15 hours a week, 30 weeks per year practicing and playing tug-o-war

Essay topics

• A religious awakening and wanting to spread their religion on campus
• Overcoming the setback of not winning a Pokemon card tournament (not satirically or tongue-in-cheek, just played straight). This was from an American student and really contrasted with some of the hardships I read about.
• Learning to play guitar and dressing better to get more attention from girls (particularly a crush)

LORs

• A recommendation where most of the checkmarks were just "above average," and none were "in the top 5%" or "one of the top in my career." The content of the letter was consistent with this, saying the student was among the strongest of their batch (after a teaching career of several decades) and had some other faint praise. There's nothing inappropriate about such a letter, and it's important for recommenders to maintain credibility, but this international student was going for close to a full ride.
• English teachers making sloppy mistakes in punctuation and grammar (which means either it wasn't actually written by an English teacher, or the school doesn't have good English teachers, which are red and yellow flags, respectively)
• On the flipside, a letter of recommendation from a Hindi teacher in perfect English obviously written by ChatGPT, incluing characteristic headers. According to the student, it was written in Hindi and then translated with ChatGPT. But there was no indication of this in the letter or any accompanying note.

The only disappointing part about my experience were the "no-shows" who had booked free reviews and never joined despite multiple automatic e-mail and text reminders. Although a few were timed conveniently to give me a break from a whirlwind day, those were slots that could have gone to other students.