A short guide to evaluating a college admission essay

College admission essays are meant to be personal and writing it can be hard. The pressure is even greater especially if the student is writing it for the college that he or she wants to get into. Although a college admission essay is only part of the whole college application process there is no doubt that it is often what determines a college student’s entry into a certain college or university of his choice. GPA or SAT scores might say how good a student is intellectually at the moment but a college admission essay will show how much potential a particular student has. The fact is that many college students have high GPA or SAT scores and many are at the top of their class so it will be hard to determine which applicants should be granted admission base only on those factors. College admission essays gives a lot of information about the student that grades and extracurricular activities could never give and those information could be vital for a students chance to be admitted to a college or university.

A student applying for a certain college or university will try his or her best to write an effective college admission essay because it is the one thing he has control over the entire college application process. Although college admission essays are personal in nature there is still a format to be followed in order for it to be effective and structured. The format composes of an introduction, body and a conclusion each having its own purpose.

College admission essay introductions are usually a paragraph long, but it should be able to summarize the students essay and make it easy to understand the student’s main point or idea. One way of determining the quality of a student’s introduction on his college admission essay is by reading just the introduction and seeing if you can guess the rest of the essay.

The body of a college admission essay is pretty much the most critical part because it explains the student’s main ideas about the subject he or she has chosen. It tells how passionate the student is about the subject at hand and how well he or she understands it; the body of a college admission essay also shows how good the student’s writing ability is and how well he can express his ideas through written words, but the most important purpose that the college admission essay body has is that it gives some insights into the students values, personality and willingness to achieve his or her goals. College admission essays could be several paragraphs long but always remember that each paragraph should have three to four complete sentences.

The conclusion of a college admission essay should sum up the student’s main points. It should support the facts that students have stated in his or her essays body and it is the last chance for the student to write any new information he or she might have left out in his research. The conclusion is usually ended by a final remark or sentence stating why the student should be given admission into the college.