<p>Several of the schools I'm applying to have optional short answer questions on the application. I am of course going to answer the question for my top choice school, and I already submitted another with answers to the optional questions. However, one more school has two optional short answer questions. Is it really worth taking the time to answer these?</p>
<p>The admissions people at several of the colleges we visited all said that the “optional” questions aren’t really optional. It won’t help you to decline to write them, in other words.</p>