<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>If you copied and pasted it, that happens. You need to fix it in the box.</p>
<p>Yesterday my son submitted the application, and upon review he found both of his personal statements filled with a?? and other formatting gibberish, like 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>When you copy and paste your essay into the box you’ll encounter a bunch of formatting errors. The most notable -that I found- was the a? in space of apostrophies and hyphens. You can try pasting the essay into notepad to strip the formatting, or retyping the essay into the UC app.
In all honesty I doubt the UCs will care too much about bad formatting.</p>