I’ve been working on the Common App and a lot of schools have very similar supplements. Instead of writing a unique one for each, would it be acceptable to write one great essay and adjust it to fit each? These prompts are very similar so it won’t be a stretch to alter it to fit each one. Adjusting for word count would be the hardest part. All I need to know is if this is frowned upon by AO’s or if I will be fine.
Sure, you can do that. Obviously if the school takes the common app, you use the SAME essay for all of those schools. But if they have supplemental essays, you can certainly re-use parts. Now… if the essay topic for each school is “Why College X?”, you certainly can’t reuse most of those essays, you need to tailor those to the specifics of the schools. But even for those, one of my kids was able to reuse a part of the essay for a few schools (a part that referred to a very academically intense summer program and how she was looking for a college with equivalent academic intensity). But even that didn’t apply to every school. It just wouldn’t have rung true for her safeties, for example, they weren’t known for intense academics.
You maybe able to use some paragraphs.
Alright, thanks for the answer. I didn’t want to go to much into specifics since nothing is set in stone yet but I will say that the supplements are all very similar to the Common App Prompt 4. It seemed like it would be difficult to justify having a different answer for each school about what problem I’d like to solve.
They won’t compare your essays. But I do think admissions officers are pros at recognizing when someone is shoehorning in an essay that doesn’t really fit their prompt.