Oh the drama!

Hey bloggers. I know this post is a little late but man have I got a story for you. So here's the background: Chinese education agents are people who charge 50-60,000 RMB per student to "assist" them in applying to foreign universities. They tell their clients to send their TOEFL and SAT scores directly to them and there are rumors that these agents photoshop their scores and submit them on behalf of the student (again the altered scores are rumors that aren't proven). These agents also write application essays for students and apply for schools with them as well. If you're interested in learning a little more about them, Click Here.
Rewind to last year in my second month working as a school counselor. A student comes to me and asks if I can look over her essay. She sits next to me while I ask her questions and she make the appropriate changes. A couple days later I get an email from my then supervisor, now coworker, that says, "I saw you working on a college application essay. This is not your job. The student has an agent to do that for her." You can imagine what uproars came from that email.
Fast forward to spring 2014. My American boss starts getting verbal for our soon to be seniors to stay away from agents because the foreign teachers are more than happy to edit essays with them FOR FREE! We are paid to be their teacher... AND we tell them the truth. Last year's seniors contacted me recently and told me about how their agents told them all kinds of lies and if they had known then what they know now, they wouldn't have paid so much money to work with an agent. So agents lie to students to keep their business alive. So anyway, editing essays appears in our contract for our second year so that when someone says it's not our job we can say, "yes it is and here's the proof."
Fast forward to Fall 2014. I have a number of students who are in and out of class (no surprise there). Yet I keep getting requests to look at application essays. The only difference between this year and last is that I'm getting these requests from my Chinese coworkers. They turn to me and say, "Chelsey I have sent you two essays." I ask, "When do you need it by?" At the start of the semester it was, "not until next week." Plenty of time for me to track down the student in class and say, "Let's work on it." In the last month, the answer became, "It's due by midnight tonight." So of course what they're basically saying is, "do it fast and don't talk to the student." A fight breaks out over this and foreign teachers start making it a policy that if they are to read an essay the student must ask, not the Chinese counselors.
Last week we discovered that my Chinese boss, Sharon, and a few other people (Chinese counselors) are being paid AS AGENTS to do the work. That's why the increase in essays has been so high. We brought this issue up to Sharon and said that we weren't given enough time to edit essays and she said, "the PS is the most important piece, it's true. So we need to support our students as best we can." I refused to edit a few essays because the counselors refused to tell me who the student was. So an American coworker did some asking and we discovered the following: Sharon charges each student 50,000RMB as a basic fee for the Chinese counselors to write essays for students and get them edited by foreign teachers. She is guaranteed a bonus of a few thousand RMB per acceptance letter the student receives. The student doesn't need to do very much work in their application process. The agency is under another name so that the school isn't associated (at least not directly). When we hinted to Sharon that we knew what was going on she told us that we are to just keep supporting the students as best we can. We aren't sure what will happen next but all foreign teachers are banning together to stop this illegal and unethical practice. I'm really nervous because it's already causing tension in the counseling office. Grace (one of the members of the agency and my Chinese coworker/previous supervisor) yelled at Sharon in Chinese and started crying. Once she left Sharon told Michael (the other American counselor at this school) that we need to start helping Grace by telling the foreign teachers to stop "complaining" about having to fix essays for students without the student being present. Grace refuses to talk to either of us and Sharon is constantly in and out of our office to make sure we're still working hard on application essays. I hope this gets settled soon. Until then... Laters.