a?? came out all over my personal statement

<p>when I typed my application, it looked fine in the box. after i submitted it, however, "a??" now appears in all places where an apostrophe or other punctuation is suppose to. what did I do wrong, or does this happen to everyone? thanks for the help.</p>

<p>that happens to everyone i’m pretty sure. It happened to me. If you copy and paste it from Microsoft Word or some other place, some symbols are not recognized by the UC app. It didn’t show up like that for me until after I pressed next and then came back and looked at it. Once I came back, all indents disappeared and quotes and apostrophes became a??. You have to just change them from there. If you actually submitted it, I don’t know if you can make changes to your essay, but I am sure the people reading it will end up reading a lot of a?? from many different applicants and they probably know what it means.</p>

<p>The same happened to my son yesterday, after he submitted the application. In addition to a?? some words that start with w, got broken down to be “w hy” instead of “why” etc. It made essay very difficult to read. That is a serious glitch in online application, especially given the importance of personal statement. I wonder how many other people experience it and how UC application administrators address this issues.</p>

<p>It happened to me when I used words with contractions.</p>