Yale adcom 对essay问题的回答

atongmu

There are several reasons why we reduced the number of esaays this, none of which is great emphasis on the GMAT.  In fact, the admissions committee will be placing somewhat LESS emphasis on the GMAT this year.

Here are the real reasons:

1.)  When we looked at the decisions we made last year and the readers' ratings of the essays, we found that we would have made the same decisions if only one of the esays was rated instead of all of them.  We could not justify the additional work required of the applicant to write additional essays that did not necessarily impact the decision-making.

2.)  You can find, on this website and elsewhere, services that offer to write or edit your essays for you.  We think this is unfair to the vast majority of our applicants -- who write the essays entirely on their own.  It would be unfair to the honest essay writers to weight the essay section heavily when it can be so easily manipulated.

3.)  We are hoping to read one interesting, well-organized, coherent essay from each applicant, rather than several essay that, taken together, may or may do a good job of telling the applicant's story.

Note that another change we made this year show how much we value getting the know the applicant, as opposed to relying on standardized test score -- our interview policy.  Not only will we be interviewing a greater percentage of our applicant pool this year, but we are no longer requiring that applicants must come to Yale for their interview.   Our alumni/ae our helping us to many, many more interviews around the world this year, and staff will fan out around the globe during the Round Two for off-site interviews as well.  During the interview, unlike the essay, what we see is what we get.  We think that helps level the playing field for the ethical applicants -- which we believe are most of our applicants.