How Long Should A College Essay Be?

How Long Should A College Essay Be? Claremont McKenna dropped the requirement as of November 2018, and Wellesley finally stopped asking for ACT Writing . Princeton has replaced the SAT or ACT essay requirement by deciding to require a graded essay from a high school class instead. But, if you feel like you don’t have anything to say, start here. Imagine an admissions counselor reading that in your college essay. While College Board and ACT have made these components optional, a small number of colleges continue to require or recommend them. Students typically must finalize testing decisions well before they finalize their lists of where they will apply to college, so a significant majority of students still take the essay exams each year. Duke provides “recommended” guidance and drops strong hints that the essay is still worth submitting in many cases. The list of holdouts, though, continues to decline. Another student sent a life-size blowup of herself attached to balloons. It was supposed to fly…but alas the balloons didn’t work. And yet another student staged a sit-in in an admissions office lobby, refusing to leave until she was able to speak to a few admissions people. Needless to say, this tactic proved as ineffective as the pies and the blow-up person attached to balloons. University students, like these students doing research at a university library, are often assigned essays as a way to get them to analyze what they have read. When it comes to the college essay, admissions committees have seen it all. The worst thing you can do is make up a story for your college essay. You are good enough the way you are, and there is definitely a topic out there that you can write about without having to lie. You don’t even need to tell a slightly exaggerated story. Too many words had been added that just did not reflect the student’s vocabulary or mode of writing. College admissions readers are bright and intuitive and can tell when an essay has been “helped” too much. I see no problem with parents doing a grammar/spelling check as well as offering suggestions on how an essay could be improved. We are in CA so it used to be needed for the UC’s but as you noted even that has changed. So now post-Covid, do you still advise most of your students to take the writing exams, or feel that there is “more upside than downside” to taking them? My 11th grader previously did the SAT w/essay and scored 760 R&W, 650 M, and 4/4/5 on the essay. The SAT Essay and ACT Writing continue to pose a conundrum for students. Just be sure that it still reads like it was written by a 17 year old and it shares the story that is important to them and not just an important sounding topic that a parent thinks would be more impressive . The colleges read them and often use them to drive decisions that couldn’t be made with just grades and test scores alone. So give your essays the time and attention they deserve, but also, have reasonable expectations about how much even the best essay can accomplish. If I’m understanding correctly, the only students who need to be taking the writing/essay exams are those applying to the first 9 schools on your list that are “required” or “recommended”? You don’t have to pull out all the stops to impress the reader, you just have to be authentic and creative. There should be no mention of how miraculous your life is and how profound you can be. Aside from mistakes on the essays, college admissions counselors discuss in “The Daily Beast” how one student sent pies, claiming she wasn’t a good athlete but she was a good baker. The admissions counselors thought the pies were quite tasty but this did not lead to an acceptance. Most of the time I see that parents get into an essay and take away the student voice…they make it too polished for a high school student. Colleges get suspicious when they receive an essay that sounds like a PhD wrote it. I have seen too many essays where parents “helped” and as result, the essay lost the student’s voice. While it seems like an interesting story, the excerpt above is a complete lie. The reader should never think about fact checking what you’ve written. Your essay should be genuine and based on fact, not fiction.