The evils of hidden application essays..

[Loric]

I just thought it'd be nice to come together this holiday season and complain about how schools like to hide short essays (100-500 word response prompts) deep within their applications.

 

Void of spellcheck, possibly going to timeout if you hang out on the webpage too long, and probably asking questions you explicitly answered in depth in your SOP or PS.

 

Seriously, what is up with these questions hidden at the end of applications?

 

It feels like a weird "gotcha'!" attempt on the part of the admissions group.

[JadeS]

Two of my schools did this! One had three of them- with 200 word max or something. What's worse is they were questions they explicitly asked to be answered in the SOP, too. 

 

I guess you can always save and log out of the app then come back. It caught me by such surprise that I jus typed an answer that I thought was different enough from SOP to be interesting but not something off the wall. Hope I did well enough on them!

[LinguisticMystic]

Close, but the actual worst are sneaky essays with character limits, not word limits...

 

... I'll limit your character, application form!

[danieleWrites]

These hidden essays are an atrocious practice, really. It's not like the ghostwriters so very many students pay to write things like admissions essays, SOPs, personal histories, writing samples, and whatnot are immediately available to write those hidden essay questions.

 

Perhaps I am an admiring cynic full of schadenfreude. Perhaps I regret not pocketing the 100 bucks to write a personal statement for a fellow BA student all those years ago. Nahhhh.

[Loric]

You have to admit that putting these questions - which beg for serious and well thought out answers - on a webpage that's going to time-out if you don't hit some button within a period of time and offering no spellcheck or anything is pretty craptacular. 

 

People writing pretty much anything else for submission at least have the benefit of a basic spellchecker. 

[Monochrome Spring]

You have to admit that putting these questions - which beg for serious and well thought out answers - on a webpage that's going to time-out if you don't hit some button within a period of time and offering no spellcheck or anything is pretty craptacular. 

 

People writing pretty much anything else for submission at least have the benefit of a basic spellchecker. 

 

I'm pretty sure we're all capable of copy-pasting the prompt into a word editor that provides a spellchecker. Also, that time-out only slows you down, as you have to re-log-in. But no one said that you have to type out your whole answer in X amount of minutes and only write it in that application box. The internal application essay is not some evil entity. Sure, it's not the most convenient, but it's really not a big deal.

 

However, I will agree with you that many ask questions that you've already answered in your SoP; and that is annoying. I will also agree with you that character/word limits are difficult; but they are something that you deal with for the rest of your life for the sake of keeping things standardized and short enough for committees to process quickly.

[Crucial BBQ]

I just thought it'd be nice to come together this holiday season and complain about how schools like to hide short essays (100-500 word response prompts) deep within their applications.

 

Void of spellcheck, possibly going to timeout if you hang out on the webpage too long, and probably asking questions you explicitly answered in depth in your SOP or PS.

 

Seriously, what is up with these questions hidden at the end of applications?

 

It feels like a weird "gotcha'!" attempt on the part of the admissions group.

The amount of applicants who whine about 100 word "essays" seriously concerns me.  If you are admitted somewhere, you will be "got" on a daily basis.  Seriously, it's grad school....you're supposed to write!

 

The prompts should ask things that you are familiar with, so what is the big deal?  Oh, you already covered that topic in your SOP?  Oh, ok.  Well forget about it then.  

[Loric]

The amount of applicants who whine about 100 word "essays" seriously concerns me.  If you are admitted somewhere, you will be "got" on a daily basis.  Seriously, it's grad school....you're supposed to write!

 

The prompts should ask things that you are familiar with, so what is the big deal?  Oh, you already covered that topic in your SOP?  Oh, ok.  Well forget about it then.  

 

You don't think the process should be more transparent though? So that someone isn't "got" by an essay that's wedged between the page that confirms your letters of rec and the final submission recap?

 

I feel like it should be that you go and "apply" and everything is laid out before you and clearly visible. The 100 word ones are "meh" annoying, but there are 500 word essays that demand a serious answer lurking about in some of these applications too. And if something is in your SOP and in a short essay, you've pretty much wasted valuable space. You can't always go back and edit the SOP by that point - particularly in art/design/architecture they want the SOP as a seperate file (preferably PDF) emailed to an adcomm rep.

 

Why? Because they're judging how you laid out the pages and your basic visual heirarchy. Copy-paste into a text box wouldn't allow that. In those fields how the SOP looks is just as important to how it reads. I had an architecture professor who would take points off papers because he didn't like how it looked.

 

So you get to the essay in the application and you've already answered it, already submitted the SOP via email, and.. now what? Rewrite what you already wrote and sigh knowing that you're just restating the same thing and aren't left with many options.

 

I don't think it's the end of the world or even bad to ask these questions. I think it's awful to hide them in a larger application where it's not obvious they're going to be lurking and without the ability to view them prior to encountering them in the "live" application.

[nohika]

I'm pretty sure we're all capable of copy-pasting the prompt into a word editor that provides a spellchecker. Also, that time-out only slows you down, as you have to re-log-in. But no one said that you have to type out your whole answer in X amount of minutes and only write it in that application box. The internal application essay is not some evil entity. Sure, it's not the most convenient, but it's really not a big deal.

 

However, I will agree with you that many ask questions that you've already answered in your SoP; and that is annoying. I will also agree with you that character/word limits are difficult; but they are something that you deal with for the rest of your life for the sake of keeping things standardized and short enough for committees to process quickly.

 

That's been something I didn't really realize until coming here. Yeah, grants are short, etc. But manuscripts also have to conform to those limits - my advisor was talking about how many references she's had to cut out sometimes in order to stay under the limit the journal wants. It's interesting. She's encouraged me to use as many as I can now and then learn how to cut them out later.

[TakeruK]

I think it's really annoying when the short essay questions repeat things asked in the SOP. But when I see this, it might also be a sign that the questions are meant for different audiences. Sometimes, the short 100 word essay about "why you want to study X" is actually meant for the graduate school or for fellowship applications (so that they can say they admitted student Z or awarded fellowship Y to student Z so that they can study X". I wouldn't assume that this is the case though and if they ask the same questions as the SOP, I would just copy/paste from the SOP and reword if necessary. In most of my applications though, whenever there are individual questions, they actually do not ask for a SOP. So instead of submitting an essay, you just answer the 5 or so questions in short paragraph form. One school even wanted 5 separate PDF files, one for each aspect of the SOP.

 

I think the school definitely expects you to write the answer in a word processor on your own computer and then copy and paste the text when you are done. Many of my time limited forms reminded me to do this. In the sciences, many applications for funding or other programs (observing time etc.) require researchers to type all of their information into boxes like this. These boxes are void of any formatting so that when the application goes to the judges, they all look the same, all have the same formatting, and all have the same font. There's no way to get around page limits by tweaking margins etc. For better or for worse, this makes the judgement based more on the content of the application, not the way it looks. 

[Brisingamen]

These are super-annoying! I'm not sure how much "polish" they expect. That's the worst part.