Insights

What the documents actually say

Short pieces on how selective admissions is read — built on documents the universities publish themselves, with our own judgment marked as ours.

The company that built the AI detector dropped it first

Parents ask whether to run a draft through a detector. What those tools actually measure is not who wrote the essay — it is how predictable the vocabulary is. Which is why the honest writer is the one who gets caught.

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There is no GPA field on a B.C. transcript

The question we hear most is what GPA a student needs. The number is not on the transcript. B.C. schools do not calculate one, and they do not rank.

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There is no field for total service hours anywhere on the application

One of the questions we hear most is how many hours of community service a student needs. The Common App never asks for a total. And in B.C., every graduate already has thirty.

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Where a university tells you how much your activities count

Nearly every U.S. university publishes a Common Data Set. Section C7 lists how much each part of the application matters — in the school's own words.

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Seven structures — and the most crowded one scores lowest

We sorted 559 admitted-student essays by structure. There are seven. The door most students walk through is the one our reviewers rate lowest.

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