“She Got In”: 30 Of The Worst College Admission Essays Shared In This Thread

Ones with text speak (r, u, 4ever), ones where kids forgot to change the name of the school for a different essay, ones where they tried to explain they're a good student despite a 2.0 gpa..

Former admissions counselor here:

The worst essays, generally, are not particularly interesting. They receive the worst scores because they are short, incomplete, riddled with grammatical mistakes, or are written by non-native speakers. It takes 30 seconds to give the lowest score and move on.

However, one memorable essay sticks out. A student (rich, white, private school) wrote eloquently about how inner city black students ought to take up more sports. Specifically, polo, lacrosse, and squash. With conviction, this particular student, woefully unaware, wrote about how inner city students could learn more about competition and overcoming adversity from taking up these sports. His proposal was to host sports camps (in the suburbs) for the students of color to attend.

The worst CV I ever saw as part of an application to a graduate program was a barely-intelligible, un-formatted mess that included such bits of information as she likes to spend her free time reading and her favorite book is "fifty shade gray"

Girlfriend is a college admissions officer. She read over a hundred essays from Chinese prospective students that all talked about "helping the blind". Had no idea that so many Chinese teenagers were active in their blind communities.

I used to intern at the admissions office at my university and got to read a couple essays from time to time. Firstly, you won't believe how many of these essays contain a sob story, or a story about how the kid went on a service trip and how it changed their lives.

Not exactly the worst, but I think the most cringe-worthy essay I read was one where this guy talked about how he thought he was more mature than anyone of his age, how he never talked to anyone in school because he thought they were too dumb for him, and how he spends his free time having conversations with scientists on the Internet. Also for some reason he felt the need to mention multiple times that he was straight edge and didn't understand how other kids of his generation found alcohol and drugs fun.

I mean, his GPA was pretty good and he seemed like a decent kid but f*****g hell was that essay hard to read.

I talked with some admissions people and their biggest peeve is when someone talks about volunteering for an under-served population and they end with "I went there to help them but they ended up helping me!" chestnut.

We had an applicant send in a book they wrote and published themselves. It was difficult for us to really read it, because for some reason the book really stank. We just put it in their file and shut the door.

A girl in my school wrote about how she thinks the essay portion of applications should be removed because it's degrading to the student. Don't remember if she got in.

He translated his essay into binary by hand.

Not a college admission officer but a lady at an engineering conference was bragging about her son's 750 Math SAT and how he was so brilliant and his application essay was so unique that he would surely get into MIT.

I'm about 90% certain that application went immediately into the trash.

A kid tried to justify a massive amount of absences by explaining that he had a phobia of worms and was unable to walk to school after it had rained (as worms had crawled out into the sidewalk).