On Word I’ve typed up my Midyear Updates and word counted to confirm that it’s 250 words. When I paste it into the February Updates & Notes Form, however, it continually gives me the message “Your updates exceeds the allowed length. Please edit your response.” I’ve tried deleting a few words to see if my Word program was the problem but it still says the same thing.
Does this happen to anyone else?
Are you using bullets? I wrote my update w/ bullets on word and the word count was 245 but the FUN form didn’t accept it. I counted up the bullets, and removed the according number of words (approximately) and bam, it worked, so they definitely count other characters as words.
I’m not using bullets in the Word doc. Also, I’ve tried typing it directly into the FUN form instead of copy+paste and have removed the spaces between paragraphs but it still returns the same error message.
IIRC Chis Peterson said they don’t actually use words, but they use characters with an approximation of how many characters are there per word. Just cut down some words/use smaller words.
Even if what I said is completely wrong, MIT probably uses a different system for what counts as a word and what doesn’t from what Word uses. Usually, applications (including the Common App) say that. Just cut down some words until the system accepts it.
Yeah, that appears to be the case. I emailed Admissions and they mentioned something similar-that the number of characters dictates the allowed length more so than the number of actual words.
Regardless, thanks for the help.
In case anybody needs help with this issue, here are the values of my updates before & after editing to fit the MIT FUN form requirements. All data was taken using the “Word Count” tool in Microsoft Word 2003.
Original Text
words: 250
Characters w/ spaces: 1630
characters w/out spaces: 1373
Edited Text that Fits Requirements
words: 242
characters w/ spaces: 1581
characters w/out spaces: 1343
So it does appear that the number of characters is taken into account. If I were to estimate a maximum length, I’d imagine it to be around 1345-1350 characters.