Does a college essay need a conclusion?

RReaders in Stanford's admissions office, the office we learned from, graded academic writing on something most students never think to show. Take a small literary dispute: Twain said his pen name came from a riverboat captain who used the call for two fathoms of safe water, and a magazine later suggested he lifted it from a humor column so weak that he invented the nobler story to cover his tracks.

Nobody knows for certain which account is true. Most applicants writing about a puzzle like this would feel obliged to settle it before the paragraph ended, and in doing so they would throw away the most useful part of the material. What the reader is grading explains why.