<p>I submitted the common app to ALL my schools, only after submitting the final one, I realized something. My essay had a heading on it from when I wrote it last school year. That's a date from early 2012, and my teacher's name. I'm just about ready to break down after this. Every time I worked on it, I simply edited what I had. I totally forgot there was a heading at all. Now I'm really nervous that this isn't going to go well at all for me. </p>
<p>How badly is this going to go against me? </p>
<p>Be honest, please. </p>
<p>I'm not applying to any prestigious schools.</p>
<p>Talk to your guidance counselor. Maybe you need to send a note to each school explaing your essay was a school assignment, I.e. all students had to write common app essay.</p>
<p>I’m not worried about that as much as I’m worried about how it looks that I never realized to take the header off.</p>
<p>I’m sure they’ve seen this before. I can’t imagine this would be the difference between getting into Harvard or not. If you are applying to schools less selective than Harvard, even less likely to matter.
The upside: it shows you didn’t wait until the absolute last minute to write the essay ;-)</p>
<p>Good lesson for everyone else reading this: PRINT OUT the entire application a day or two before you intend to submit it. Read every single line of it no matter how sick of looking at it your are and have SOMEONE ELSE read through it too. Preferably someone who is very picky and knows grammar and punctuation well.
Don’t leave this for the last minute or do it at 3 AM when you are exhausted.</p>
<p>Stop-pulling-ur-hair-out,
just send them a quick e-mail and explain ur situation. If ur not applying to any prestigious schools, it hardly matters. Admission officers are used to such mistakes.</p>
<p>“Good lesson for everyone else reading this: PRINT OUT the entire application a day or two before you intend to submit it. Read every single line of it no matter how sick of looking at it your are and have SOMEONE ELSE read through it too. Preferably someone who is very picky and knows grammar and punctuation well.
Don’t leave this for the last minute or do it at 3 AM when you are exhausted.”</p>
<p>You said it, BeanTownGirl. I can’t believe the things I see when I look at the common apps of even our top students. Really silly mistakes. Lots of issues in the EC section.</p>
<p>This is a trivial mistake. They will probably ignore it and I doubt it will count against you. I wouldn’t even waste time pointing it out to them with an email. It’s likely to be overlooked anyway.</p>
<p>I didn’t print it out, because our printer is screwed up, but I opened up the print preview, maximized it, and left it up on my computer for a day, so every time I wanted to use my computer I made myself read the whole print preview. Tedious, but I caught a few things.</p>
<p>I’m just going to be the devil’s advocate for a second… What if the admissions officers think she’s reusing an old school assignment, so she’s just being lazy? What if they think she didn’t change a single thing on it?</p>
<p>If she had an old school assignment that **just happened to **answer the question on a college application, why wouldn’t she use it? (and what are the odds of that by the way?). The local high school here has an English elective class where the students do nothing but work on their application essays, months in advance. So things like this happen all the time!
The other way they could look at it is, “wow - this student has great time management skills, she wrote this essay months ago instead of waiting until the last minute!”.</p>
<p>Why are people looking for new ways to stress out about the tiniest things?! Chill people!</p>
<p>Adcoms will care about the quality of the essay! That’s all.</p>
<p>And the essay is less important than the academic record a student spent 4 years working on, or even test scores.</p>
<p>A lot of school assignments have the very broad topics that could fit on the common app. I don’t have any class like that, and none of my friends have taken anything like that. I was just pointing out that it could like she’s recycling something she already did. If the quality was good, but it was written by somebody else, would that matter? Because I thought “Adcoms will care about the quality of the essay! That’s all” so plagiarism wouldn’t matter? The essay may be less important, but it’s not UNimportant. That’s like test scores don’t matter because Rigor and GPA are more important.</p>