How to use college essay examples without copying them

FFormer Stanford admissions officers say readers do not rank essays against one another; each application is read on its own, in the context of its school and its student, and the essay is judged by what it adds to that particular file. Families rarely act on that. Every fall they pass around essays that worked, the one about a grandmother's garden or the one that got a cousin into Stanford, and students read them and quietly begin writing a version of them.

The habit feels like diligence. In a process that reads every essay inside a single file, it does something closer to the opposite, and one former officer can say exactly how a reader recognizes it.