Recent research on the college application essay has shown that essay prompts are misleading, and that the expectations of admissions officers remain largely implicit. These studies have not, however, examined how essays written by low-income, ethnic minority students are scored by admissions officers. For this study, forty-two seniors at a…

While the college admissions guidebook industry has churned out numerous books and websites telling students what their essays should and should not do, most of those are written by former admissions officers, not by writers or teachers of writing, and almost all rely heavily on providing models of top admissions essays. As a result, students who…