I noticed that in Brown’s supplement questions, the word limit on a couple has been reduced. Specifically, the community question has been reduced from 150 to 100 words and the Why Brown question has been chopped from 200 to 100. Is there any particular reason behind this? I would think that since the Why Brown question carries a lot of weight, that there would be more space granted so applicants can showcase exactly why they want to come to Brown. Now it seems as if one can fit in a couple sentences of explanation and maybe one specific piece about the school, but not much else. 
My specific guess is that they wanted people to cut to the chase and reduce the fluff/bullcrap due to the increasing number of applications each year.
Yeah, Brown has quite a few supplements (especially if applied to STEM, PLME, or Brown-RISD), and they’ve cut down on these through the years, so they’re probably just trying to cut down more. It helps the readers to get through an application quicker, and it can also weed out people that are writing a lot of fluff/don’t actually have good answers to the questions.
@greentealover @artblogger Makes sense. I know if I had 30k applications to go through, I’d certainly rather get to know applicants quicker to make my decision. Do you think these cuts will help or hurt applicants?
@bwulv24 It all depends on how you make use of those 100 words.
"Do you think these cuts will help or hurt applicants? " IMHO, Brown doesn’t care b/c they realize that there’s not much new under the sun one can write that hasn’t been written before. Personally, I think the “why X” short answers are bovine crap. Brown or otherwise.