College Application Essay Coaching

College Application Essay Coaching Parents are blinded by love and perhaps perfection. Each student needs to be able to claim authentic ownership of their essays. Mom and Dad may be great help during the brainstorming process of generating essay topics. More than any other element of the application, the essay gives insight into who a student really is. Asking someone who is slightly more removed from the application process may be the wisest route to go. While parents mean well, any constructive feedback may be misinterpreted, creating conflict at what can already be a stressful time. Teachers, guidance counselors, even friends are viable candidates when looking for a second opinion on your writing. If you pair good college choices with good applications and essays, you’re likely to be happy with your results. More commonly, a great essay takes you from being just another kid among many with great qualifications and moves you to an applicant an admissions officer will lobby for. Many do this through sports, science, or the arts, but others join activities such as speech and debate, mock trial, and Model United Nations. I recommend that students try to find an adult other than their parents to help with essay editing. So it should “sound” like the applicant, revealing personality, interests, quirks, personal style, and voice. Some parents can act as a sounding board without taking over the project, while others cannot. While it is okay to have a parent proof an essay, they are not always the best option. They’ll share your story and their vision for why they believe you deserve a spot on campus. And at the more selective colleges, that’s about the best you can reasonably hope for in this processâ€"one person who’s convinced, who will make an effort to convince the rest of the committee. It takes more than good grades and strong test scores to get into competitive colleges like Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. High school students today have to stand out by excelling in their extracurricular activities. Those distinctions are best answered by honest, revealing essays that help admissions officers get to know you. We contacted Miami, and they are still maintaining that it is required for placement. Given their testing page, I find it hard to believe that they are rejecting students for not having an essay score. We will be leaving it up, however, until we get clearer guidance from the school. The did say that a single test with an essay is fine. That’s a difficult question to answer because of all of the potential factors. Have you had a practice essay scored to know where you stand? Also, don’t expect an essay score to stand out in the same way that your ERW and M scores might. Some colleges feel that removing “recommended” would mean that they are diminishing the importance of writing as a skill. That’s not the same thing as saying that it is important to them in the admission process. If you really feel that you will do poorly or that the anxiety might negatively impact the rest of your test, you should be OK without it. 8 falls within the 25th-75th range of enrolled students at even Berkeley and UCLA. More important, the UCs are likely to drop the essay requirement this year. That said, I don’t like to stand in the way of students motivated to retest. They are so different that they can’t really be compared. Also, we know that the 25th-75th percentiles scores at the most competitive colleges are 8-10, so your essay score should not be a concern.