Just a small observation from reading through (too many) applications: schools that I would have expected (based on reputation) to have phenomenal prompts had fairly straightforward, boring, standard topics/questions (and I’ll even go so far as to say one was downright lame), while a school that doesn’t have the same sort of reputation for intellectual rigor had some really great, thoughtful and well-considered prompts. Reading my child’s responses, I could see when he was clearly engaged by the question and had some fun with the response, versus when he was just trying to cover the required components of the response. I would think it’s in the AOs’ best interest to make the prompts as interesting as possible, if only to save themselves from dying of boredom… 
Agree. I also caught from a few posts/threads here that some schools used the same essay prompts as they did last year. Is this the norm? If I was an AO I’d at least like to switch it up a bit year to year.
One school seemed to have as many short essays for parents as they did for the students. =))