<p>I know we're not admission officers, but what do you feel is more important, a good personal essay or amazing letters of recommendations?</p>
<p>personal essay is one way for you to describe yourself and show your writing ability, but letters of recommendations show what kind of student/person you've been all four years of high-school. what do you think plays a bigger part in college admission?</p>
<p>i would rather know what someone else thinks about you.</p>
<p>NW: send me your rec. I’d really like to read your “amazing rec”.</p>
<p>To answer your question here: it depends on the school. They all list their criteria, and the list is also prioritized. You can find this information on collegeboard. Go to the individual school, click on the college profile, then on “admissions”. Scroll down until you find “Admission Policies and Factors”. After checking quite a few just now, it looks like the Essay outweighs Recommendations.</p>
<p>IMO, essay. Admissions officers want to see what makes you YOU. Recs are important for making sure you are a good student and will contribute to the campus, but a strong essay will get you much further in admissions than a strong rec and a ****ty essay.</p>
<p>True… but I don’t know. In my opinion letters of rec sum you up for your entire high school career, essays show you performed in a two-three week process haha.</p>
<p>“essays show you performed in a two-three week process”</p>
<p>The point of the personal statement is to show the adcoms your personality. While your writing skill is also being evaluated, even an extremely well-written essay will not help if the adcoms are not impressed with who you are as a person.</p>
<p>Most schools evaluate applications holistically. Both the essay and the letter of rec matter. The essay is particularly important for letting your own voice come through in the application. The recommendations are important because adcoms need a confirmation of the rest of your application. (If you have a special connection with a recommender, he/she can introduce new, relevant information about you.) Your entire application comes together to give the adcoms their impression of you. Unless a school uses some sort of point system, I don’t think essays are more important than recs, or vice versa.</p>