Dr. William V. Raszka, our Associate Editor, offers the following insight into a current topic in the news:“It is 513 words long. I have to cut something,” lamented my third son. He was applying early action to two colleges and was trying to finish his Common Application admissions essay. The deadline for submission was three days away and after a day of work he had shown the essay to my wife and me. “The essay has to be 500 hundred words or less” he told us. He wanted to know if he should cut out descriptions of the field, the turmoil he felt, or something from his plans for the future. Evidently, our son is not alone in his struggles.
As reported in The New York Times (Education: October 28, 2011), this week many high school seniors are fine-tuning their college admission essays to ensure they meet the new word limit guidelines. After four years with no upper limit length, new guidelines state the essay should be 250-500 words long. The restriction was in response to a general feeling that essays had become too long. However, unlike in other parts of the online application where a strict character limit exists, essays longer than 500 words are still uploaded in their entirety.
Moreover, colleges are not told if the essay is longer than 500 words. In theory, a student could still write an essay of any length. While most college admission officers report they will continue to read all essays regardless of length, they do point out that students exceeding the established guidelines are taking a substantial risk. Without a true fixed word limit, however, many argue that not much difference exists between an essay of 520 and 500 words and that forcing students to chop an essay to conform with an arbitrary limit puts too much pressure on them. As for my son, he re-worded his opening lines dropping some descriptions of the field and happily filed a 496-word essay.
Noted by WVR, MD
*This filler excerpt can be found in the December 2011 Pediatrics print journal p.1185, or via online here.
