INDEPENDENT · NOTHING HERE WRITES YOUR ESSAY
College application guides and tools
Sourced reporting on what is actually changing this cycle, and free browser-based tools that help you organise your own material. We do not sell admissions consulting, we take no money from any institution named on these pages, and nothing here generates application prose.
Everything in this section
This section is new and deliberately small. We would rather publish two things we can stand behind than twenty we cannot re-verify.
Colleges dropping supplemental essays 2026-27
Which universities removed or reduced their supplemental essays, listed school by school with the source behind each entry — and with the unverified and miscategorised claims named as such. Plus what fewer essays actually does to the weighting of the rest of your application.
Free browser toolStory Bank Builder
Turn real experiences into a structured inventory before you choose an essay topic. Scores each experience across six dimensions, flags language that asserts quality instead of showing it, and detects when two of your stories are really the same story.
Free · runs in your browserHow this section works
Admissions content is an unusually low-trust category: most of it is written to sell consulting, and lists get copied between sites until nobody knows where a claim originated. Four rules keep this section useful.
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Sources are labelled
Every factual claim carries its source, and we distinguish a university's own announcement from a news report from an aggregator repeating an aggregator.
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We name what we cannot verify
If a school is circulating in roundups and we cannot find a source, we say so instead of adding it to make a list look longer.
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Dates are real
A verified-on date means someone re-checked on that date. If a page has not been re-checked, its date does not move.
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No essay generation, ever
Our tools produce questions, structure and scores. They never produce a sentence you could submit to a college.
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