A Revamped Ranking of College Essay Prompts — Spambler '26

Two years ago, Kacey Archer ‘24 published her ranking of your standard supplemental prompts in the 2024 Spambler. Today, we give a fresh take on the essay experience. Trust us, we are qualified—between us, we wrote almost 50 supplemental essays, a combined 12,000 words, plus two academic papers…we sure are glad to have that behind us! Get hyped, Juniors!

S-TIER

Columbia’s Media List

List a selection of media you enjoy. 100 words. This essay is the dream for nerds of any type. You spend forty-five minutes or so poring over your movie logs, bookshelves, newspapers, and magazines, plays—(you even throw in KEXP and a musician’s YouTube house tour.) You have the opportunity to yammer on and on about your favorite stuff. You would do it for free! Well, you actually pay for it—shoutout 21st- century application fees! 

Williams’ Academic Paper

Williams College does a lovely little thing—instead of another suffocating supplemental essay, you just turn in an essay you already wrote for school! Unfortunately, your magnum opus, the US History paper, is too long for the limit. But just write one respectable essay in your senior fall—you have to do it for school, anyway. Then you can revise it and send it in to Williams, with free pro editing from the teachers’ feedback. Easy money.

A-TIER

“How have your experiences shaped who you are today?”

You write one essay for an early action school about your childhood and its connection to your wonderful, attractive, grown-up personality. Then, you open the rest of your applications to find out you can reuse that little thing for four other prompts, give or take 50 words! It would be an S-Tier if the original effort wasn’t so taxing.

Specifically, Toronto’s Residential College Essays

After writing thousands of words for American colleges' abstract prompts, you open U of T’s residential college application to see them say, “We don’t really care about the grammar or quality of writing, DON’T OVERTHINK THESE!!!” Then, you scroll down to see prompts so straightforward, they’re cathartic. What’s something you do in your free time? Who’s someone you look up to? The only aspect holding this back from S-Tier is the combined 800 words that these add up to—however, after hours of toiling over the horrible American prompts, these words will flow out in no time.

B-TIER

Super Short

If you’re an overthinking person, you’ll probably spend hours switching out words and punctuation in your 100- word supplemental essay, believing that you’ll only be admitted if your writing is worthy of a Pulitzer for poetry. Even so, these are still short in the grand scheme of things, especially when you also have the opportunity to stress over 250-word Why Us prompts that might ACTUALLY determine if they let you in.

C-TIER

Here are six prompts; choose two!

Another one for the overthinkers. Annika reports having written drafts for every single offered prompt, no matter how useless they may have been, just to make sure no opportunity was missed (this is not recommended). Sometimes these just boil down to choosing the least boring and most malleable prompts that will end up being carbon copies of ones from other schools. Shoutout to one college’s wording of their prompt: “Pick at LEAST one but NO MORE than two questions to answer.” It seems as though admissions officers were struggling to hit the word count as well.

D-TIER

General Why Us?

Even though these are meant to be original, you can get away with mashing some old supplements together if you’re applying for a similar program or major. Just don’t make the mistake that Annika did, and apply to two schools with “Why this major" prompts requiring up to 800 words, and write about two completely different areas of study.

UW Honors

Together, we declare this essay to be the most challenging effort of our collective processes. Both of us poured in hours, and neither of us reached the word limit—one of us was TWO HUNDRED WORDS under. And UW Interdisciplinary Honors is so cool—the problem was the somewhat uninspiring prompt, due weeks before most applications, and nearly five hundred words long. One of us had written about an extremely exaggerated story about Mr. Root—the other wrote about an “incredibly impactful” experience that happened the night before. Not our best work.

F-TIER

Specific Why Us?

These have to be original every single time, and often require deep research into the underground club scene at schools in order to explain how you’ll engage with specific facets of its community that you’ve never heard of. From writing about an honor code that is nearly double the length of the supplemental word count to the use of “extracurricularly” in a sentence, these prompts were some of the worst written and hardest to deal with. If we’re expected to limit our creativity to 150 words with absolutely no mistakes, just to get a chance to pay an arm and a leg for education, the same standards should apply to the admissions officers writing the prompts!

Abstract Prompts

Shoutout UChicago. They’ve developed a reputation for quirky little prompts, gaining plenty of attention. But the day you, reader, will toil over their “Uncommon Essay” will be a day you unfortunately remember well. Clara spent hours researching “spurious correlations” before switching gears entirely to writing about the Fremont Lenin Statue. After more hours, she read her draft with disgust, thoroughly discouraged. UChicago isn’t the only culprit, however—another college’s five-hundred-word “What do you know about yourself to be true?” is burned into Annika’s brain. If you have a good idea, these are doable. If not, you’re screwed. And chances are, the creative juices will already be running thin with schoolwork and your other applications piling up.