<p>I was on the Common App on Thursday finishing up my responses. The brown supplement had really short word limits, but somehow i managed to squeeze everything in, and i was pleased. I opened the Brown Supplement literally five minutes ago and all the questions had increased character limits. What is going on? How could Brown just expand the character limit when so many people have probably already turned in the application? Will my responses look really short compared to the newly expanded limitations? Should i re-write? </p>
<p>I KNOW!!! I’m really ****ed cause i had almost finished and had some pretty good responses. Now i feel like i have to make them longer, which is pretty annoying cause i had wrapped them up to fit nicely in the characters available.</p>
<p>Does anyone know what we’re supposed to do in this case? I was just about ready to submit everything and now I’m not sure if they want us to go by the new character count or not… It doesn’t make sense because I’m sure many people have already submitted their supplements long before the change was made!</p>
<p>I’m pretty sure they increased the character count because they realized how short it was. It’s to help people, not to harm them.
Thus, I don’t think you’ll be penalized for having “too short” of an answer.
Of course, I can comfortably say this not having submitted my supplement yet…;)</p>
<p>What I don’t really understand is why they made the change when people have already turned in their supplements/been working on making everything fit within the allotted space… Well, I guess it’s back to the drawing board for those of us who have yet to submit the supplements? Ugh. I understand that this is to help us and all, but it’s just kind of frustrating since I was almost finished… I’m actually debating between turning in what I have now and not instead of changing all of my answers to accommodate for the new character counts… There shouldn’t be a penalty for doing so, right?</p>
<p>Oh goodness. I think I’m going to expand my answers to what I originally wanted to include before I condensed them to fit the limits… if they’re giving us more space, it’s because they want us to use it, right? I doubt there’s a penalty though. Just miscalculation on their part…</p>
<p>I’ve started to expand some of my answers but I’m not making any big changes. Because I had already cut everything down to exactly what I wanted to say, I don’t think there’s much else I can do… Plus, I’m always hearing that brevity is the way to go as long as there’s substance to back it up. Anyway, good luck to everyone still working on the supplements!</p>
<p>I had assumed it was a mistake, but I just called the Brown admissions office and apparently it’s not – the woman informed me that the character limits changed, but the word limits haven’t. Does anyone know what the word limits actually are? If the Common App gives them to us, I can’t find them!</p>
<p>I’m pretty ****ed about this whole issue too. My question is, for those of us applying via the Common App online, are we supposed to have our answers fit both the word limits AND the character limits, or go by the character limits only? After all, the Common App makes absolutely no reference to the word limits, so not all applicants would even be aware of the word limits. I’m asking because my first answer (not yet re-done) already has 40 words out of 50 yet has 73 available characters remaining…should I just use longer words or something?! Aasfajfhfchfg, wish I actually knew what to do. T.T</p>
<p>Since I’m not actually filling out an on-line form, and can only see on the supplement where it lists “limit number of words” I’m wondering if they increased the character limit to actually fit the same number of “words” into the field?
FYI for those of you young ones who never had to take a typing class, technically a “word” is 5 characters. (I think it is 5 if I remember all these years back.) It has to do with typing speed as defined as words per minute. (eg: I love you. is actually only 2 words in the world of publishing etc.)
Maybe the original field had 5 x X100 characters, but people who didn’t know this 5 character rule were complaining when they had “microbiology” or something over and over in their essays were not being able to fit X100 real words in the field. (so they increased the character count for the non-typing/editing students.)
Anyway, I would just make sure your response fits in the character field, and don’t worry too much if it is a bit shorter!</p>