How Much Does the College Essay Count?
As you start thinking about applying to college, you’re probably wondering how much you should focus on your admissions essay. This is understandable because the essay is unlike every other part of the college application. The GPA and SAT/ACT are objective scores; the essay, on the other hand, seems vague and subjective. Do college admissions officers pay attention to college essays at all?
The answer is yes, but not in the way you think. Here are a few things to note when you find yourself asking: how much does the college essay count?
A good college essay won’t make up for bad grades.
The most important part of any college application is your GPA and SAT/ACT. These scores are the first thing admissions officers look at when assessing an application, and they will literally push you out of the pile if you’re not competitive for their school. Very often, parents will call us and say that they want their high school senior to write a great essay because their grades aren’t competitive for Harvard or Princeton, and we have to tell them that it doesn’t work this way.
But that doesn’t mean the college essay doesn’t count. On the contrary, the college essay is becoming increasingly important in today’s competitive environment.
A good college essay will boost your overall application.
College essays may seem subjective, but for seasoned admissions officers, they’re in fact very easy to assess. An experienced reader of college essays can probably tell you the relative merits of an essay after reading it for a minute or two. Not only that, but it’s standard practice to assign grades to essays as a part of the application process.
So your college essay may seem like one or two double-spaced pages, but it will be given a number just like your GPA or SAT/ACT. And this number will be taken into account as the reader assesses your overall application. If you write a good college essay, it will raise your chances of getting in; if you write a bad college essay, it will lower your chances.
The college essay counts less than your GPA and SAT, but it counts nonetheless. And in certain situations, it becomes the most important factor of all.
A good college essay is often the tiebreaker that gets you in.
When a large number of students have similar GPAs and SATs (and this happens all the time!), there’s only one way for schools to distinguish between them, and that’s to turn to the essay.
What happens next? Admissions officers look at a set of scores that seem almost identical, and then a set of essays that are wildly variable. Most applicants boast about their achievements in their essays and recycle cliches that admissions officers have read a thousand times before; a few students, on the other hand, write something that genuinely captures their attention.
You don’t get any prizes for guessing who gets in.
The takeaway here is that the college essay is one of the most underestimated parts of the college application. A good essay won’t make up for bad scores, but it will always improve your application, and in many cases it will be the factor that gets you in.
If you’re interested in writing an essay that captures top colleges’ attention, don’t hesitate to get in touch and we’ll connect you with a college essay tutor! We’d be happy to help you find your story.