<p>Do the admissions officers read the essays like essay graders? Are the essays a measurement (to them) of one's writing ability? Is it like a test?</p>
<p>I think that as long as it shows that you can present a clear and coherent thought with no grammatical errors you're fine. For borderline students it may be different: they might judge the content, style, etc...</p>
<p>Btw, I am no authority to this and am merely speculating :D</p>
<p>Absolutely! From reading essay help books that grab much of their information from adcom's, they definitely test students with essays. In fact, one adcom from a private uni went as far as saying that if a student fails at communicating through the essay, they would deny them admission no matter how stellar his or her stats are. They also relate your writing ability to gauge your preparation. What pellman said sums it up pretty much.</p>
<p>By borderline, what do you guys mean? At the average? A little below average? WAY below average?</p>
<p>Theoretical thoughts of the adcom:</p>
<p>"Well, student A and student B are both good enough to get into our school but I only have one slot. Lets see if their essays can help me weed out the lesser candidate..."</p>
<p>Lets say that there is a range of holistic achievements that a certain college requires to accept students. </p>
<p>GPA=G/50
EC=E/20
ESSAY=S/30</p>
<p>G+S+E=holistic achievement score</p>
<p>Lets also say that they decided to accept students in the 80-100/100 range, a range that admits students just the right amount of students to fill the maximum amount of transfers possible. Lets also theorize that the students in the 78-82/100 range are much too close to call. </p>
<p>The adcom's will then sift through their essays looking for anything to weed out the excess students. In conclusion, a borderline student is a student at the lower end of the adcom's "holistic achievements" range.</p>
<p>its not in place to test your english</p>
<p>they honestly want to learn as much about you, as possible</p>
<p>but its give that you should be at college-level writing abilities</p>
<p>It probably depends on the specific UC and your other stats, but when I applied for freshman admission, I too was under the assumption that it was a guage of writing ability. I think it is more of a guage of writing ability for schools like Berkeley, but a school like San Diego, as we know from their very transparent point system, looks at the essays to very specifically evaluate the activities you were involved in. Of course, it has to be well written too, but I am fairly certain that San Diego wanted the content to be very cookie cutter and concrete.</p>