Many college admissions officers are downloading students' new SAT writing sections to compare them to the essays the students submit as part of their college applications. As the New York Times explains, admissions officers seem to think that putting the prepared essay up against the one written on the spot will allow them to decipher which students have received extensive outside help on their applications. Sadly, this practice does nothing more than underscore the benefits of expensive tutoring services.

Let me explain: A student with poor writing skills who receives extensive help on his admissions essay but none on his SAT writing section will probably produce two papers that have little in common and stand out dramatically to college officials. In addition, because his writing score is so low in the first place, admissions officers will be more likely to seek out the cause of the discrepancy and punish those they feel have misused outside help.

To counteract this potential problem, rich parents have two options. They could decide to drop essay tutoring altogether, and hope that their children become the type of writers who are rewarded by both the SAT and college admissions officers on their own. This is a much cheaper, but much riskier strategy. Instead, logic dictates that they should seek out ways to make the SAT essay less likely to stick out. This means (wait for it) more tutoring—the very thing that college admissions officers think they are trying to discourage.

As I've mentioned before in Gelf, the SAT writing section is probably the most coachable part of the test. As a tutor, I taught a specific formula to help my students prepare for their supposedly expository essays, right down to particular turns of phrase, and routinely helped them gain over 200 points in that section alone.

In the Times article, the author brings up this point briefly but then dismisses it with the help of Dan Saracino, the assistant provost at the University of Notre Dame. "You can see the canned responses," Saracino says. "It doesn't take a rocket scientist to identify that this is a pat response that is a result of Kaplan." First of all, this is probably false. But secondly, and more importantly, admissions officers are only likely to look at the actual essay from the SAT writing section if they feel that the score on that test doesn't match up with the quality of the admissions essay. So even if an assistant provost can tell if a an SAT essay is the product of tutoring, the 7th and 8th grade English teachers who grade the test for ETS (under an extremely rigid grading system) reward tutor-assisted essays with terrific scores. And a terrific score, accompanied by a well-written application essay, will rarely be questioned.

That means that admissions officers have become sort of like the Bush administration. Their policies can make life a bit more difficult for middle-class families who can only afford certain types of tutoring for their students. The rich, who can pay for comprehensive assistance for their kids, can skate above the fray. And the poor, per usual, stay screwed.