UVA has long used supplemental essays in its admissions process to assess a range of applicant qualities. In the 2022–2023 cycle, the university included multiple short-answer prompts, such as “What is your favorite word?” and “What kind of course would you design?” which clearly encouraged applicants to think creatively and express their quirks. The 2023–2024 cycle looked different. After the Supreme Court reversed race-based affirmative action and as public scrutiny of DEI practices increased, UVA moved to a single essay focused on an aspect of an applicant’s individual background. Now, for the 2025–2026 cycle, UVA has removed supplemental essays entirely. In this Middle Grounds issue, our writers will examine the merits of removing supplemental essays and debate whether this change is ultimately a good idea or a misguided one.
- The Editorial Board
UVA Should Remove Supplemental Essays
A Cavalier Daily columnist recently pointed out that the timing of UVA’s decision to remove supplemental essays was hard to ignore. The announcement came just over a month after the resignation of former University President Jim Ryan and during a period of increased federal scrutiny of DEI initiatives. While it is certainly possible that this decision was politically motivated, I do not think that it diminishes the decision’s educational merits.
Supplemental essays have long been viewed as a way to capture a student’s individuality. In practice, however, they often reflect access to resources more than genuine personal expression. A Stanford study analyzing 240,000 application essays from 60,000 University of California applicants found that essay content is more closely associated with household income than SAT scores are. Linguistic features and topic choice explained about 16 percent of the variation in family income, compared to roughly 8 to 12 percent for standardized test scores. The same research showed that essay content also strongly predicts SAT scores, meaning that income, test scores and essays are tightly connected rather than serving as independent checks on one another. Inside Higher Ed summarized these findings plainly, noting that application essays correlate with family wealth even more than the SAT, largely because wealthier students can afford extensive coaching, editing and consulting.
Objective academic measures such as GPA and SAT scores, by contrast, become more equitable when evaluated using a “contextualized admissions process.” Contextualized admissions considers school resources, neighborhood income and access to advanced coursework when reviewing academic performance. Researchers from the Stanford Educational Opportunity Project have shown that interpreting GPA in the context of school disadvantage significantly reduces bias in admissions decisions. Also, while affluent students do have greater access to SAT tutoring, a comprehensive study on the subject revealed that tutoring produces only a modest gain of approximately 20 points on average. Moreover, tutoring is far from a necessity in today’s testing landscape. Free and widely accessible programs such as Khan Academy’s extensive SAT preparation resources seek to level the playing field for students regardless of income. In contrast to essays that can be intensively edited, rewritten or even ghostwritten, standardized tests still offer one of the more objective tools available for assessing college readiness when interpreted in proper socioeconomic context.
Another reason why I am in support of UVA’s decision is because supplemental essays only add to the growing complexity of the college application process. A survey conducted by The National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) found that more than half of the 1000 students surveyed ranked applying to college as their most stressful academic experience. A Brooking’s Institution study found that Black and Hispanic students, first generation students, and students from low income or rural backgrounds were disproportionately represented among those who did not complete their applications. Most notably, the study found that completing the essay was one of the strongest predictors of whether a student ultimately applied. Students who finished the essay were 50 percent more likely to submit their application.
The rise of artificial intelligence only strengthens the argument against multiple supplemental prompts. Recent research indicates that high school students increasingly feel pressure to use AI tools to assist with college essays because they assume their peers are doing the same. UVA has responded by requiring applicants to certify that they did not use AI in their application. While well intentioned, this policy is difficult to enforce in practice. AI detection tools are unreliable, and admissions officers do not have a realistic way to verify authorship across thousands of submissions. By reducing the number of institution specific essays, UVA limits opportunities for AI assisted gaming and allows greater students to divert more attention to the one substantial Common App essay.
Many of my peers at UVA argue that eliminating supplemental essays undermines UVA’s commitment to holistic admissions. I strongly disagree. UVA will continue to consider the main personal statement, course rigor, extracurricular involvement, leadership, recommendations and school and socioeconomic context. These elements together already provide a detailed picture of each applicant. The suggestion that individuality is lost without supplemental essays overstates the authenticity of highly polished and likely AI-edited responses.
Even if the decision to remove supplemental essays came during a politically charged moment, its merits stand on educational and ethical grounds. Fewer essays mean fewer artificial barriers, less stress for applicants and fewer incentives for reliance on coaching or AI. For a public university that claims to value access and opportunity, this was not a retreat from holistic admissions. It was a necessary correction.
- Mira Ramachandran
UVA Should Not Remove Supplemental Essays
When I applied to the University of Virginia three years ago, in the Fall of 2022, I was required to submit three short supplemental essays alongside the Common App: a 100-word essay specific to the College of Arts & Sciences, and two 50-word essays responding to prompts I chose from a list. These types of supplemental essays have been part of UVA’s application process for decades and remain standard at comparably ranked schools, such as the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Michigan. However, this year, the University made an unexpected change to its admissions process: supplemental essays were removed from the application entirely.
I believe this is a mistake for many reasons. First, it could serve to increase the volume of applications, making UVA’s admissions even more competitive without meaningfully improving the quality of an admitted class. Supplemental essays can serve as a barrier to applying to a school, as applicants must spend time and effort writing them. Taking the time to write supplemental essays for UVA shows an applicant’s true preference for the school and helps filter out applicants who aren’t as interested. With a 17% acceptance rate and record-high numbers of applications, even with supplemental essays, UVA is in no dire need of attracting more applicants. The main consequence of the influx of applications would be to artificially drive that rate further down, making UVA appear ever more selective. Despite making the school appear more prestigious, I fail to see how removing supplemental essays would actually attract more qualified applicants, and not just applicants who wouldn’t have been interested in UVA enough to apply otherwise.
We can also assess the economic side of this issue. Annually, college applicants and their families spend hundreds of millions of dollars applying to schools they’re ultimately rejected from. UVA’s application fee is $70, meaning that the school made $3.4 million in gross profits from rejected applications in the last admissions cycle. With more applications, that sum will only increase.
As the admissions department receives a higher volume of applications, it also loses an important tool for evaluating them. In a blog post from a past admission cycle, Dean J, a Senior Associate Dean of Admission at UVA, wrote that the admissions department created their essay prompts “in hopes of inspiring you to share something about yourself that we wouldn’t otherwise know from your application. Ideally, your topic will be a vehicle for sharing your voice and style. It’ll let you be authentic in your writing. It will give us insight into who you are and what things interest you.”
Supplemental essays give students a chance to express themselves and to display crucial skills. When I wrote my application essays, I was forced to practice self-reflection, to write clearly, and to creatively express broad ideas within a short word limit. I was also able to show UVA things about my personality, interests, and ways of thinking that were intangible on the Common App. Numbers may show how well an applicant performed academically in high school, but they can’t show anything qualitative about that applicant as a person. Some might say that colleges shouldn’t care about “fit” or “culture” when evaluating applicants, but I disagree. I’ve had an amazing experience academically at UVA, but what I’ve valued most here are the relationships I’ve formed and the people I’ve met. A student body with a wide range of interesting and diverse personalities is foundational to any university education, and it shouldn’t be disregarded in our application process. When an admissions department reduces an applicant to a collection of numbers, important strengths they have can become invisible.
The information conveyed by supplemental essays regarding applicants’ personal qualities helps distinguish them from one another and be evaluated more holistically. So, an application cycle without supplemental essays could feature more applicants than ever, who are also harder to distinguish between than ever. The process would be more competitive and more superficial.
The USA’s current system of college admissions has long been derided as a “crapshoot,” due to the seemingly random nature that competition between tens of thousands of similarly qualified students can take on. Students hedge their bets, applying to as many schools as they can, often making decisions based on detached stats and rankings, rather than personal interest or fit. This makes being accepted to each school more difficult due to the amount of competition, and, by flooding admissions departments with applications, makes the review of each applicant less thorough. In turn, high school seniors are more and more stressed about college admissions. Often, applying to a greater number of schools prolongs this stress, because, come spring, admitted students are left choosing between multiple schools that they were accepted by but don’t feel attached to.
Removal of supplemental essays would make UVA’s admissions process more of a “crapshoot,” not less. Applying here would be more and more competitive, and therefore stressful, for high school seniors. University spokesperson Bethanie Glover said that the essays were removed in order to “reduce stress and anxiety around the college application process,” but in the long run, this decision could do just the opposite. As UVA’s prestige inflates and its application revenues rise, its prospective students will continue to be stressed, confused, and left adrift by the college admissions machine.
- Fletcher Gillespie
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