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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]She is going to be mad and cry.

But it's really really bad. Her grades/SATs/rigor are tippity top. Her essay is terrible and doesn't say that much about her.

Do we just rip the bandaid and tell her? Any tips on phrasing or what to say?[/quote]

I was you last year.

I told DC that it is pretty bad. The one popular admissions counselor we had it reviewed with came back with this feedback: "strongly recommend picking another topic and rewriting the personal essay". DC did not want to change, but added a couple more introspective sentences.

In at a HYPSM and 4 other T20 schools.

Just try to make sure it tells something about her. If she cares about the essay topic it comes out in the essay.

[/quote]

How much weight are essays even given? There is no way to know who actually writes them. DD's isn't amazing but I think it does let the reader know a little something about her and it doesn't sound like ChatGPT. [/quote]

Essays are important but personal essay is the least important part of the application. This is also where it seems the vast majority of the applicants spend a lot of their time on. [/quote]

Essays don't matter a lot outside the top 25 schools. But for the highly selective universities with single digit admission rates, they matter a lot. Nearly everyone applying to Princeton and Duke and the like has outstanding stats and ECs. Essays are the place where you can get an admissions reader to champion a student at the table where they decide these things. A well written essay goes a long way when it comes to distinguishing a student from the gazillion other high stats applicants.

The essay might not matter at UVA or UMD. But it will make a big difference at Brown and Yale and the other highly selective schools. And they can tell if something was written with Chatgpt. They read 40,000+ essays a year. They can tell what's authentic and what's not. [/quote]

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