<p>"Please respond to the following essay topics with up to 250 words."</p>
<p>But we have 1800 characters? And then other threads say that your essay should be between 250 and 325 or so. What? </p>
<p>Have they changed the word count, or can I still use the characters available? Will I be penalized for going over 250 words (say, 275?) </p>
<p>Thanks,
Another Panicking Student</p>
<p>Well, 1800 characters is the technical limit, but the given limit is 250 words or less. You can also write more than four lines on the questions asking for four lines, but does that mean you should? Or is this all an experiment by the infamous Stanford Psychology Department?!</p>
<p>I think this is a ploy to make us go crazy 
I’m just confused as to why the character limit would be as high as 1800 when 250 words is almost always as low as 1500 characters. Arggggg</p>
<p>They want you to use bigger words obviously. Seriously, I’m sure it’s just a buffer, so no one runs out of characters.</p>
<p>Ah, okay. I guess I just need to read more carefully in the future, since I wrote all of my essays to 1799 characters. Thanks for the help!</p>
<p>If they ask you to be in a prison experiment, don’t do it!</p>
<p>Good luck with your application.</p>
<p>But maybe it’ll help my admissions chances! Haha, thanks and good luck to you too!</p>