When it comes to college application metrics, many students prioritize maintaining strong grades and achieving high SAT/ACT scores, understanding that these numbers have a big impact on admissions. But when it’s time to write their Common App personal statement, they start to worry—what if their essay doesn’t measure up? Or worse, could a weak essay ruin their chances entirely? Can a bad essay ruin your application? Let’s break it down.
Can a Bad Essay Ruin Your College Application?
So, can a bad essay ruin your college application?
In a word, yes, of course a truly awful essay can ruin your application—but you already knew that.
If your personal statement declares that your life’s goal is to become a James Bond-style villain who holds the world hostage so that you can enslave the entire human race—and only by attending University X can you develop the knowledge, skills, and connections that you’ll need to execute your dastardly plan—well, no admissions officer in their right mind is going to throw your application into their Accepted pile.
But that’s not the question that you’re really asking, because you’re (hopefully) not a cartoon villain bent on world domination. (I hope so, anyway. I’d be a terrible minion.)
What I strongly suspect you’re really thinking is, “I don’t love my essay,” or “I’m afraid I won’t love my essay once I get around to writing it. Will an essay I don’t love ruin my chances of having a strong application? a great college experience? a successful career? a happy life? If I misplace one single little comma, will I die sad and alone—unloved and unmourned by all who met me?”
The simple answer to your question is that, no, unless your essay features you openly plotting world domination, the odds that it will ruin your application are quite low. There is, however, one very simple mistake that many students make that can ruin their application.
One Surefire Way for Your Essay to Ruin Your Application: AI Plagiarism
Colleges want authenticity in your college essay. That’s just one reason why you’re supposed to write them yourself. If an Admissions Officer suspects that your essay was not written by you but was instead generated by an AI chatbot (and it’s generally quite easy to tell if it was), it takes only a few seconds to run it through an AI-detector like GPTZero or Quillbot.
If the results indicate that an AI wrote even part of the essay, that’s it. You’re rejected. And, no, they won’t be interested in reading your letter of appeal, regardless of its authorship.
(And for more on AI and college essays, check out HelloCollege Essay Coach Gina Twardosz’s blog post “Can I use ChatGPT for College Essays?” which discusses what is and is not appropriate use of AI in the college essay process, and HelloCollege Counselor Don Keller’s post “Can College Admissions Officers Detect ChatGPT?” which discusses all the ways admissions officers can suss out inappropriate AI usage.)
How Can an Essay Harm Your College Application?
But you’re a bright, earnest, hard-working high school student who would never dream of using AI to cheat on your essays. So, what potential harmful mistakes should you still try to avoid?
Essay Mistake #1: Sloppiness
The easiest way to harm (but probably not ruin) your application odds is sloppy writing. The grammar and mechanics of your college essays should, ideally, be pristine. That’s not to say that you need to have perfect grammar, but you do need to be able to use tools and to get help from other people to ensure that your final essay is well edited.
If you’re writing in an app like Google Docs or Microsoft Word, use its grammar check features to give your essay an initial pass. Grammar apps like Grammarly can be helpful too, but, while admissions officers won’t mind you employing this sort of AI-based assistance, make sure you run your draft through an AI-detector to make sure that Grammarly’s input doesn’t raise suspicions.
Apps are great, but they still can’t beat an attentive human eye, so, once you’ve written your essay, take it to someone whose English you know to be excellent—a teacher, a parent, a HelloCollege Essay Expert—and ask them to proofread it.
So does this mean that one misplaced comma will ruin your college dreams? Certainly not: Admissions officers are primarily interested in you and your story, not your perfect mastery of English grammar. I’ve had students with essays featuring the odd typo or misplaced modifier get into the Ivies and MITs of the world, because admissions officers are not fools, and only a fool would assume that an otherwise brilliant student is a dolt because they accidentally typed “its” instead of “it’s.”
Essay Mistake #2: Picking a Bad Topic
One of the easiest ways to create an underwhelming essay is to choose a bad topic. This mistake is so common that we already have a HelloCollege blog post on the top 5 college essay topics to avoid.
A bad topic can certainly hurt your application odds, but more likely, it won’t hurt your odds—but it won’t help either, not because the topic is actively harmful, but because it’s a cliché, and therefore easily forgettable. A clichéd topic won’t hurt you, but it also won’t help you to stand out from the pack of other applicants. Your experience recuperating from a torn ACL by performing endless hours of knee extensions exercises was challenging, yes, but it’s also probably pretty much identical to the experience of most every other kid who ever tore their ACL.
If you want more in-depth discussion of topics to avoid, or at least to think twice about, we’ve got a number of further HelloCollege blogs addressing problematic essay topics. Check out “Should You Talk about Divorce in Your College Admissions Essay?” and “Talking about Mental Health in Your College Admissions Essay,” for more pointed discussion of challenging college essay topics.
Essay Mistake #3: Not Focusing on High School
Sometimes, students will make the mistake not of choosing a bad topic but of focusing on that topic at the wrong part of their life. In the extreme, some students will attempt to avoid picking a topic at all by trying to cram their entire life’s story into their college essay.
While these approaches may make sense for a few students—if, for example, you lost a parent at a young age, or if you immigrated to the United States in elementary school—but for most students, 650 words simply isn’t enough space to effectively tell their entire story.
Likewise, focusing on a story from too early in life—meaning, generally, anything before high school—is liable to leave admissions officers wondering what you’ve been up to in high school. Sure, you were obsessed with dinosaurs when you were 12, but telling us about the time in middle school when you watched Jurassic Park in your friend’s basement won’t convince anyone you’re ready to study paleontology in college. Admissions officers want to know what you’ve been up to lately.
Conclusion
The perhaps frustrating fact of the matter is that most college essays neither help nor hurt an applicant, because most college essays aren’t memorable enough to stand out in an admissions’ officer’s mind. That doesn’t mean that essays have no effect: Plenty of essays are either good or bad enough to nudge a decision one way or another, but—unless you’re making unforced errors like engaging in AI plagiarism or failing to properly edit your essay for basic grammar and mechanics—very few essays will completely tank your application.
So, then, how do you select a college essay topic that stands out? Well, you might want to start by checking out HelloCollege founder and CEO Kevin Krebs’s blog post “College Essay Topics that Stand Out,” and to go deeper, book a consultation to start working directly with your personal HelloCollege Counselor and Essay Coach.
There are an infinite number of great essay topics available to you. Let us help you find them!
