<p>
I’m sort of with xiggi on this. Based on the college essays I have read, mainly by very good students, I think it’s likely that 80% or so of essays are essentially “bad”. Not awful, but not not-bad either. Just bad. Half of the rest may be truly awful. In many such cases, the authors will be disqualified by multiple factors, so the essays won’t make much of a difference; at a college with an 11% admission rate, it really doesn’t matter whether you are ranked in the middle quintile or the fourth quintile of applicants. And half of the rest will be strung out across the spectrum of “not bad” to “actually pretty great”.</p>