<p>IMHO the reporter missed the real reason colleges use these essays. It lets them gauge how interested an applicant really is. A student that skips such an essay labeled as "optional" or a student that clearly dashed it off in an hour or so sends a certain signal. A student who's work shows they wrote and rewrote it sends another. And colleges want that signal. </p>
<p>The article mentions the University of Chicago was a pioneer in these types of prompts. Which makes sense since UofC is looking for a certain type of student. Their essay prompts both keep away those that won't bother to write them and allow them to screen out those that aren't seriously interested.</p>
<p>Chicago did cling to the notion that asking for quirky --a charitable term for the often pedantic prompts that attracted the pseuso-intellectual teenagers-- prompts made a lot of sense for a selective school. That notion, however, undermined the chances of the school to keep up with the academic Jones. With the changing of the old guard (and Ol’ Ted) and the adoption of one of the most aggressive (and annoying) marketing campaign, as well as the Common Application, Chicago dropped some of its “uncommonality” and a good part of its obnoxiousness to attract plenty more applicants. </p>
<p>All in all, the quirky prompts were a giant hindrance, and not an attraction. At best, it was a failed experiment that offered excuses to the enrollment managers to justify the (relative) low level of interest of students to apply to Chicago.</p>
<p>Xig, U of Chicago has not dropped the “quirky” prompts in spite of the move to the Common App, they are just in their supplement. Agree that their pool of matriculating students doesn’t fit the “old mold”, though – my D2 thought the current and accepted students she met last spring at accepted student days were mostly obnoxious strivers, not quirky intellectuals. So she took her quirky intellectual self someplace else…</p>
<p>Personally, I’d much rather write an essay for one of the quirky Chicago prompts than the navel gazing essays most colleges ask for. My younger son wrote a short story for his prompt (and got in EA) - there was nothing psuedo-intellectual about it at all. And intparent is correct, moving to the Common Application did not eliminate the prompts at all. There’s no recycling essays for your Chicago application. (Well not unless you find a clever way to do it.)</p>
<p>He also had fun with a Tufts optional essay that asked you to tell what might have happened if the US had not won the battle of Lexington. He did it as a series of Newspaper headlines, excerpts from diaries, magazines and text books. It was a lot of fun - and I think gave the college a much truer idea of his talents than his Common Application essay.</p>
<p>The Chicago prompts are great for sparking ideas and coming at a story from a different angle. Even if you don’t apply, you can use them for practice prompts to get the juices flowing. You might find a nugget of inspiration to prompt a unique essay. My daughter used a modified version of her Chicago essay for her CA prompt. One prompt just sparked an idea for a story that she wouldn’t have thought of talking about. That story never came up in the more typical prompts that her class were given as exercises. It was about a side thing she does, not academic. It referenced an EC without being an ‘all about my EC’ essay.</p>
<p>It was the “Write an essay somehow inspired by super-huge mustard” prompt, lol.</p>
<p>My D2 was too young for the mustard prompt, but the minute she heard it (I think it was around the time her sister was applying to colleges so we looked at them that year), she spit out what she would write for it if she could, and it was really good… I think that is when she knew that she would be applying to U of C when she was old enough.</p>
<p>Thanks for the comments. For the record, I never wrote that Chicago abandoned the quirky prompts. I did write they allowed students to use the Common Application. As far as I know, an applicant can ignore the five quirky prompts submitted by the “experts” by using the … sixth prompt. And recycle an essay.</p>
<p>Unless I am mistaken, which is entirely possible, that helped open the floodgates for thousands of applicants since the days I looked at those multiple maroon packages that flooded my mailbox.</p>
<p>My daughter two years ago wrote a wonderful and creative story for the Tufts prompt about putting a fictional character in today’s society. She was very sad that her year they stopped the send us one sheet of paper with anything you want on it (she had it all planned and then they dropped it her year after having used it for many years.) She did get accepted (although chose to attend somewhere else).</p>
<p>My son applied to UofC in the mid-1990’s. He ignored the quirky prompt and submitted a version of his “generic” essay. (He did write a unique essay in applying for a special merit award.). He was admitted. Graduated. Is now a writer.</p>
<p>I think the main reason why UofC asked for quirky essays was boredom. That was even Ted O’Neill’s stated rationale. They wanted to have just a little fun in what must on the whole be a very very monotonous process. </p>
<p>I believe this is also why O’Neill commented publicly that the admissions committee often learned more from the short-answer questions (fill in the little box on the application: What do you like to read in your spare time, etc.) than from the canned general admissions essay. They were looking for dimensionality in the applicants, interesting people. And in those little boxes, the applicants were less on guard and more likely to reveal something about themselves than in the canned general essays that are often written by committee (applicant, parents, admissions advisors, teachers, etc.).</p>
<p>Which brings me back to: my son had great short-answer fill-in-the-little-boxes “winging it” answers! And I didn’t read or review them before he submitted his application – unlike his basic essay.</p>
<p>The important fact is that the essay prompt is no more than that. The applicant needs to show something that overcomes the natural weariness and boredom of the admissions officers who read hundreds and hundreds (and hundreds) of essays. Use the opportunities provided in the application . . . opportunistically!</p>
<p>I completely agree with the potential of short answers to boxes. A fact that has not escaped to the people behind the applications in Palo Alto - read at Stanford and Questbridge.</p>
<p>Regarding the prompts, there is NO need for a smart prompt to elicit a “smart” or powerful essay. Neither is there a need for a creative or deliberately different prompt. Most prompts are pretty poor in the first place with the hackneyed Why School XYZ taking the cake.</p>
<p>@xiggi Really? I’m having trouble seeing what information they can get from those short answer questions. After 17 years, I think I know my daughter pretty well. She had to fill out some short answer questions. Yet if I’d had to do it for her, I don’t think any of our answers would have matched. She likes lots of books, lots of music, lots of movies, lots of quotes, etc. I don’t feel the few she chose to put down are any more defining of her than the many she couldn’t put down, and in some cases, the alternatives are quite radically different from one another. This would be a far more useful exercise if she had to put down her top 20. Then you could really see the range of interests.</p>
<p>^I’d say it depends on the short answers, but my son put a fair amount of thought into just which three pieces of music he was going to talk about and what they had in common. (If I recall correctly it was something by Johnny Cash, Tschaikovsy and one of his Finnish metal bands.) I think it showed is range of interests. :)</p>
<p>I think the quirky prompts are attractive to some people–I liked them, and so did my kids. To me, they are kind of like the “That’s Why I Chose Yale” video–they are appealing to some people, but clearly not to everybody.</p>
<p>For better or worse, I don’t have the sense that kids could get away now with what mackinaw’s kid did 20 years ago and xiggi suggests they can do now: recycle a generic Common App essay for the University of Chicago supplement. (For one thing, since Chicago is now on the Common App, they would see that an applicant had done that.)</p>
<p>My kids were definitely in the group for whom the Chicago prompts were effective marketing tools, even though neither ever considered writing one of the really arty essays. My daughter applied during the mustard year; she thought that prompt was funny, but it wasn’t her kind of thing at all. Both kids liked the idea of going to the kind of college that would suggest essays like that, without being the kind of person who wanted to write essays like that. One of them eventually substituted a rewritten Chicago essay for the Common App essay that had been drafted and redrafted to death, because the Chicago essay was a lot more interesting, thanks in part to the legitimately interesting prompt.</p>
<p>I agree with Hunt. The quirky prompts aren’t appealing to me, personally, but if they help serve to carve out “the kinds of people who think answering these prompts is fun” versus “the kinds of people who roll their eyes at these prompts”, and the school wants the former, what’s the problem with it? U Chicago is very deliberate in its marketing and the image it wants to project of the kind of place it is and the kinds of students who will fit well there, and the quirky essay prompts are part of their marketing communication. Nothing wrong with that. Smart marketers are smart people.</p>
<p>The college need not even bother with guessing the “level of applicant’s interest” from the essay – the mere presence of an essay tends to deter marginally interested students from applying in the first place.</p>
<p>Despite all the conversations we have had on this issue, I am afraid that you still are missing the point I have made. Here it is in the simplest of forms: the “recycled” essay, which is in free form and answers to a self-selected prompt, is not a poor choice. It is the MOST powerful essay one could and should write. Think personal statement to a graduate school program. Think most meaningful essay to the applicant. I am quite certain that most people who crave to show individual talent, critical thinking, and plenty of other facets of their indivuidualism are better served by creating their own prompt and not respond to a canned and boxing prompt submitted by a future peer at the school, or another high school student who want to display his or her uniqueness.</p>
<p>Why is that different from the “smart” Chicago prompt? Because it is a lot less stifling. People mention that the Chicago prompts open the floodgates for creativity … but how can an essay that answers to a self-directed prompt be less creative, as it offers the possibility to be creative in the essay as well as in the prompt. </p>
<p>To be clear, my “issue” with the Chicago prompts has never been that they ask for additional essays --I fully support that and like it-- but how they go about in their culling and selection of the essays. As I have mentioned several times, this leads and fuels what I have called the pseudo-intellectualism at Chicago in all its splendor. </p>
<p>But I can understand that the fans of Chicago see it through a different lens. And I fully understand that parents are very supportive of the schools attended by their children. My parents would do just the same. And so it goes!</p>
<p>I don’t get it, though, xiggi. If U Chicago wants to puff itself up and put on what you call the veneer of pseudo-intellectualism and be very self-conscious about being the kind of place where essays like this are considered fun things to do on a Saturday night – what do you care?? Some kids want and like that in a college. Some kids don’t, and want a more “we’re smart, but we like normal things too” mindset. Each place can exist and each student can be satisfied.</p>
<p>And it goes further than that. It also deters applicants who could and should have been interested by a school such as Chicago for its academic programs. And plenty of applicants that would have been great students at the school, but failed to be impressed by the image projected by the school in its marketing approach. </p>
<p>Obviously, it seems to please a number of students who enjoy that approach, but the reality is that the school is missing out on bona fide great students – or at least, used to before they discovered the merit to tone the rhetoric down.</p>
<p>Great marketing always involves positioning, and positioning involves sacrifice. Frankly it’s the poor marketers of the world who want to be everything to everybody. Chicago has differentiated itself strongly versus other similar caliber schools with the whole life of the mind, intellectual, you-don’t-go-HERE-to-watch-football-and-join-a-frat positioning. The very success of a positioning is that it appeals very strongly to some and turns off others. There’s a lot to be said for this approach. </p>
<p>Anyway, there’s no fear that Chicago is “missing out on bona fide great students.” They’ve got plenty of great kids knocking at their door every year.</p>