<p>I know that in general word limits on writing questions can be fudged a little, but is this true of the common application when submitted online? Son has composed a good response to the short answer question (The one that says, In the space provided below, please elaborate on one of your activities (extracurricular, personal activities, or work experience)(150 words or fewer). His response is 167 words. Is this too long? Too long as in the common application will eventually recognize it as more than 150 words and reject it, or will cut off part of it (son cut and pasted it from a Word document and saved it, apparently successfully), or too much of a fugde as in even if the common application accepts it, an admissions officer will think that son should have edited down those extra 17 words?</p>
<p>Doubt admissions officers have the time to care about an extra 17 words.</p>
<p>The issue is more of whether the response will be cut off at 150. Put in your essay and then do a print preview to see if the answer fits in the space for the short essay.</p>
<p>My D's short essay was 150 words exactly, cut down from 230-170-150. Looks like another line could have fit into the space allowed.</p>
<p>S's essay on one of his ECs is 157 words. It fit in the space provided just fine, and the whole essay was there when I did a print preview. Looks as if an additional line or two would have fit. </p>
<p>Go ahead and put in the essay, and as ellemenope suggests, print out a copy of the application.</p>
<p>Agree with the others to test it out and do a print preview. I just checked several students of mine's activity essays for the Common App and here are the lengths: 179, 157, 157, 174, 182, 173, 171, 171, 149.</p>
<p>The only issue is what fits on. The adcoms do not count words. I think as a general rule of thumb, try to stay in the ballpark of the required lengths of essays.....going 10% over is fine. Much more than that is not in the ballpark. For example, for the Activity Essay, I would try to keep it under 170 words if that will fit on.</p>
<p>D had a different experience with the short answer question. Word count on our computer indicated 150 words - and the common app bounced it back three times saying it was over the word limit. First time she just tried it again, then she read over it and deleted a word or two and so on. When the common app decided she was within the word limit, I made her wait a day to submit it; I worried with all the online deleting going on that she might have deleted something needed.</p>
<p>Anyway - don't know why she experienced difficulty when it sounds like others didn't. Oh well.</p>
<p>I don't think the Common App truly goes by word count and it is a matter of the character count that will fit in the allotted space.</p>
<p>D's essay fit in the allotted space so she was surprised when told that it was over 150 words (and it wasn't).</p>
<p>D had some trouble with the common app SUPPLEMENTS from some schools that limited responses to a defined amount of characters. Turns out that spaces between words are characters! (Who knew?) </p>
<p>Even when she got her essays down to the maximum number of characters, the CA Supplement for XX University wouldn't accept it. With experimentation, she determined that she had to have 6 characters less than the stated maximum.</p>
<p>This sort of thing drives me nuts!!</p>
<p>ellemenope....I am helping a lot of students right now and these character counts (yes, spaces count) are really prohibitive and nerve wracking. I am glad my own children chose to send paper applications and we dealt with none of this!</p>
<p>All right, soozievt knew (that spaces count)!</p>
<p>Older D sent all of her applications by paper also (5 years ago). But nowadays, some schools really push towards online applications (one school said that you had to get the permission of the Director of Admissions in order to send in a paper app). Glad that 2008 will be our last college application season!</p>
<p>This is odd but when D pasted her 165 word essay into first application, it was not accepted and she trimmed it down to <150 and it was accepted. When she created alternate versions (6 of them) and pasted the 165 word essay, it WAS accepted in all 6! Beats me!</p>
<p>It is not the most sophisticated software ever written :)</p>
<p>DS had the same experience as woody - sometimes it had a word counter and sometimes it didn't....</p>