The Negligent Agencies
In 2012, ZE Tang started preparing for an overseas education. He wanted to find an agency to help him with his Scholastic Assessment Test, or SAT and his application.
He approached to a well known agency in Beijing. After a paying 40,000 RMB, the agency agreed to help him apply to about ten different universities. Three “teachers” were supposed to take his case: one in charge of school selection, one for document writing, and one for submitting the application and communicating with the target schools.
If he was accepted by a school and decides to go, he’d have to pay another “fee for successful applicants” to the agency, depending on the world ranking of that school.
Tang followed the application process intently. “I’ve heard before that students need to urge the ‘teachers’ to work, because usually each teacher would have many applicants on hand to process. Your impression to them would decide how much attention they give you,” said Tang.
He had a lot of feedback from the first teacher, who listed a group of universities that suited Tang and encouraged him to keep being active.
“I felt that my future was going to be bright,” recalled Tang. “The teacher showed me some cases that former students at my level had achieved,
I felt hot blood running in my body
and I was ready to make the miracle
(that I got accepted by some really good universities) come true”.
However, things started to change. He noticed through email that the other two teachers were about to be replaced.
“My document consultant was changed because the previous one “went for business leave”. But they didn’t tell me why the teacher in charge of submitting the application was changed too”.
Tang tried to book an appointment with the new submission teacher, but the front desk told him that they didn’t know the person. He also suspected that his new teacher’s email did not follow a bona fide format.
“I thought he was a new teacher, so I didn’t care too much,” said Tang. In October, as the deadlines for submission approached, Tang as well as many other students applying for colleges in the US, visited the agency everyday.
One thing surprised Tang. “The document consultant barely had time to talk with every student. I emailed him several times.He replied and asked me to write the document in Chinese first and he’d do the translation later. This was so different from what they had promised (that they'd help me build-up the statements').”
Give that the translations took a long time and were often full of mistakes, Tang decided to do the work himself. He started to check the documents carefully, providing his own English statements and asked for other people to help. Eventually, the documents that he needed only just made the deadline for early decision/action.
Deadlines for early decision/action for most US colleges are usually at the end of the year before the general admission process. Applicants need to apply to one school only and promise to go there if he or she is accepted. Early decision applicants are usually not bound to one university, but he or she has to answer the offer before a certain time once the result is released.
Worried about his application, Tang wanted to look at his own account on Common App, a website through which students can apply to most of the public universities in the US.
But he could not access the account. The agency told him that was because in case he wanted to apply to other universities himself. But the agency never told him this previously.
One week after Tang submitted all his materials to the agency, he found that his submission still hadn’t been made. “I checked the official websites of the College Board and TOFEL. They didn’t have my SAT and TOEFL scores. That meant my profile on Common App was not submitted yet. Also I didn’t receive any notice from the bank that the fees for application had been deducted”.
However, one week after Tang submitted all the materials that were needed, he found that his package was still not submitted: “I checked the official website of Collegeboard and TOFEL, they didn’t have the history of sending my SAT and TOEFL scores to anywhere, which means that my profile on Common App was not submitted yet. Also I didn’t receive any notice from the bank that the fee for application was deducted”.
Tang approached the teacher. She told him that it would fine to submit the scores late, and that she had already submitted the other materials.
By the time the results for early action were out, Tang did not get a single offer or rejection letters from the agency. They then told him that it was normal for some delay.
He and his family finally thought was something wrong. They could no longer reach the material submission teacher by phone.
Tang’s family terminated the contract with only half of the money refunded, and turned to other people to help applying.
By the time Tang submitted his test scores, he found that there were many mistakes and omissions in his profile under his account for all University of California (UC) campus, and at Common App. He was shocked.
Much of content he provided for the extra-criculirrium and accomplishments sectoin were not submitted in his account for Common App. In his UC account, some of the words of the original content went missing. One section even had half of word remained at the end of a sentence. All that, tang believed, was the result of the teacher’s careless copying and pasting.
Some content ended up as digital gibberish, but the teacher ignored that.
For every application, a reference letter was missing. According to the record, Tang’s SAT score was submitted nearly one month after the deadline.
“I called to the admission office of my target universities. They told me they didn’t receive some important materials, such as my academic transcript and the financial proof. But I handed those to the agency before the new teacher came.”
Furthermore, in Tang’s email box used for application, there were only emails from Common App. Tang suspected that all the other emails from the universities were deleted before the account was opened to him.
“I warned a friend of mine who had the same material submitting teacher,” said Tang.
“soon I received an email from that teacher asking me not to ’mislead’ other students”
“In the end, my friend failed to get into any of the universities he applied to. He believed there were mistakes that the could not see in the accounts,” said Tang. “He told me the senior teachers at the agency made an ‘emergency rescue’ on his application and got him an offer.
Tang got into the New York University eventually. “I think the delay in application made me missed the chance of getting into three to four universities I had hoped for.”
