Media Orchard has always been the book-smart type — you know, the big SAT score, voted “Most Intellectual” (yuck!) in high school, smooth sailing through academia, watching obscure French films for pleasure and the like.
We’d like to think we’re street smart now, too — but it’s been much harder-earned, with many embarrassing bumps and bruises along the way.
So we empathize with poor Bess Kargman, the book-smart Amherst grad who wrote the following first-person account in today’s Washington Post about her ill-fated job editing and proofreading college applications:
Then my employer suggested that I could earn more money working as a “comprehensive” editor….After a few days of e-mail correspondence, I would churn out the model compositions, which the students were instructed to use for “inspiration” during the process of writing their own…
….Several weeks into the process, I found out that my first comprehensive client had in fact included my essay with his application — verbatim….I confronted my supervisor: How could the company offer a service that was so easily abused? She said unapologetically that the firm’s practices and intentions were legitimate. I was taken aback by this blatant indifference. Actually, the company’s only real response was to stop sending me any clients altogether…
This form of organized, for-profit cheating was unfamiliar to me….
Hoo-boy. To get suckered like that — and then write about it in the Post?
Poor Bess was immediately skewered by blogger Kevin Drum, who asked,
Is it really possible that a grown woman who spent four years [in college] is so painfully naive that she didn’t realize her essays were being used for a wee bit more than “inspiration”? And furthermore, was shocked to discover that an online essay writing company might not be entirely on the up and up?
The snarky comments in response to Kevin’s post are even more vicious.
That’s OK, Bess. You’ll figure out the world’s wild and wooly ways eventually. We all do.
And book-smart types can still win in the end — at least according to obviously pointy-headed Harriet Rubin, who wrote of street smarts vs. book smarts in USA Today:
Although it seems that hardly anyone in business — with the exception, perhaps, of Apple CEO Steve Jobs — is acting with vision, I believe business is on the edge of a new cycle of imagination and bold products. And history shows it has been book-smart people who have most often changed the world.
Pocket protectors of the world, unite!
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