<p>hahaha interesting!</p>
<p>The varied opinions on this thread show how luck can play a big role in admission verdicts, especially at the hyper-competitive colleges that turn away applicants who are easily as “qualified” as those they accept. At those places, if your essay lands on the desk of a reader who loves it, your odds improve. But if it ends up in the pile of an evaluator who’s less enthused, that could be a deal-breaker for you when the dust settles. And, as you can see from this thread, one reader may trash an essay that another one praises. This happens in admission offices as well.</p>
<p>Tangent: It’d be interesting to read the Presidents’ (Bush, obama,etc.) personal statements</p>
<p>There are also these time constraints in evaluating an admission application.
Many officers are asked to spread objectivity in a very compressed time slice.
Probably a good number of them evaluate based on instinct from experience.
They might call it “Art” but it’s not more art than driving a plane under ice conditions while chit chatting with your copilot.
An experienced officer might get the job done but an inexperienced one might cause the accidental elimination of a planeload of admission ticketed applicants.
The low salary of the inexperienced “pilots” doesn’t help.
.
There is no any quantitative data that will evaluate the performance of the evaluators.
Yes the top 1% of the students in the country will do well in any top tier school so how wrong such an admission officer can be in dropping one and admitting the other as long as the quotas from above are satisfied? </p>
<p>Colleges should decompress the admission process, maybe by having rolling admissions, should depend more on team interviewing the candidate and they should have a better career path with more respectable salaries for their admission officers.</p>
<p>As the country, public institutions, corporations reconsider certain priorities and holy cows the same type of reflection, evaluation and change should be happening right now to the Education, public or non-profit, primary, secondary or higher. </p>
<p>I am sorry but it’s tough to justify certain College presidents’ humongous salaries and perks while ignoring changes in admission staff evaluations and salaries.</p>
<p>Sorry, Amy Gutmann would be rejected on the basis of her essay if I were sitting on the admissions committee. Everything she covered could have been found elsewhere in her application, she didn’t “show” me - she told me - and I did not hear her “voice.” :)</p>
<p>Jeez, Gutmann’s essay was terrible.</p>
<p>ahhh it makes me mad to see all of them utilize all the experience they have and STILL botch their essays. The only one I really liked was wesleyan because it could have actually came from a senior, minus some of the statements about life in college. Although barnard and reed were pretty good (though they were both completely from adult perspective)</p>
<p>Really enjoyed Wesleyan’s and Barnard’s was also interesting.</p>
<p>Sometimes I wonder if adults just become less ambitious and more uninspired with time; I think even an average student can write an impressive essay with enough effort, time and inspiration.</p>