<p>How firm are they on the 250 word limit? My essay for one of them is 279 words :.</p>
<p>I don’t think they’ll reject you because you’re essay goes over 250 words, but you should still do your best to adhere to that limit.</p>
<p>I agree with Harabee. 29 words more than the limit, imo, is a little bit too much. If you can get it to 260, I think it’ll be okay.</p>
<p>I personally followed the word limit strictly, but I don’t think you really have to.</p>
<p>People here disagree with me, but i believe that staying under the limit is crucial. For a lot of scholarships I’ve done, I have heard that TONS of people get disqualified because of going 1 word over the limit. IT shows carelessness imo. Just stick to the rule. 250 words is enough to say what you need to say.</p>
<p>i dont ever understand why people can’t follow the frikin directions. you are applying to college(!) not writing a letter to your grandma.</p>
<p>they are using commonapp so basically you should do character limit… 1800 characters max and I wrote 313 words with 1798 characters</p>
<p>^
Isn’t that a little excessive? At any rate, mine’s around 280…</p>
<p>I stayed 240-270 for all my essays</p>
<p>I doubt they will count but over 300 seems excessive</p>
<p>As most people have said, try hard to get it to +/- 5. A couple things I found helpful to do this are to stop worrying about it for several days, and come back and look at it with a fresh new perspective. Also, getting a very very close friend or a family member/ teacher too look at it and help you cut down is a good idea as well.</p>
<p>What Shapeera101 said applies to the whole admissions process, not just the stanford questions. Taking a couple days off and coming back to it is hugely important, especially in evaluating whether it makes sense, and finding errors you didn’t see before.</p>
<p>I saw this posted a few months ago: </p>
<p>Hey guys,
‘I emailed Stanford University admissions directly and got this reply:
“Please do not worry about the word count, just make your answer fit the space allowed.” Hope this helps.’</p>
<p>So… in other words, condense when necessary but don’t worry too much about adhering strictly to the word count in these Stanford Supplements</p>