My daughter worked on her “Why this university” essays all summer. Her schools are very well-thought out and well-researched but she repeats a “hook” at the beginning of each essay that explains what she is looking for in a school. It truly is how she narrowed down her choices, but now she read somewhere that colleges upload their application essays to plagiarism software to verify they are original. Though the idea is truly hers, she is concerned that once an essay has been uploaded, the schools will be able to see which other universities she applied to and what exactly she said about them (which means she would need to rewrite them all so as to not have overlap). I can’t imagine universities have that sort of time (or perhaps even the right to post student work that way?). In addition, if it’s true, all they would have to do is run a unique phrase from the common app essay and they could still compare the same information. Any insight on how this is handled and whether universities would care if there were some similarities between a students different applications? Thank you.
As an example University of Michigan had like 70,000 applicants. They don’t have the time to do as you suggest. If it’s her original ideas then she is fine.