Writing the College Essay: The Unit Plan We Use in AP Lit

The Common Core lists about 42 content standards to cover for senior-year English.

If you teach AP English Literature and Composition, you’ve got 31 core skills to cover, each with several “Essential Knowledge” statements under its umbrella.

That’s already too much.

And yet somehow, at most high schools, writing the college essay is also the English teachers’ responsibility.

Writing the college essay is, perhaps, one of the most fraught assignments that high school students undertake. (Should it be this way? Absolutely not, but we’ll save our opinions on higher education for another time.)

Students are, obviously, stressed out: they’ve been told for years that writing the college essay will determine their future success and opportunities. 

And if students are stressed out, teachers are inevitably stressed out. We spend so much of our day begging students to care, but when it comes to writing the college essay, the stakes are often higher than we want.

Writing the college essay is also confusing: colleges insist it’s only one part of a holistic review, and yet we also know that amidst thousands of similar applications, the college essay helps students stand out . . . which makes it seem like it matters a whole lot.

If you teach in a lower-income school district like we did, you may feel obligated to help. Our students couldn’t afford to spend thousands of dollars on private college consultants, their parents often had limited knowledge of the college application process, and our school had one higher education coordinator for the entire senior class of 600+ students.

For many years, we spent hours after school each week in the Higher Education Center, editing essays for any students who showed up. It was exhausting.

We eventually had to find a compromise. We wanted to help our students, but we could not take on this herculean task on top of our existing full-time job. We streamlined our process in a way that was, while still exhausting, far more manageable, and we hope that sharing it gives you some ideas to make writing the college essay more manageable for you and your students.

General Tips for Writing the College Essay in the Classroom

If you’re new to senior English and just starting to think about how you want to tackle writing the college essay with your students, you need to know that it can easily suck up all your time from October through January. If that’s not something you’re okay with, you have to create a plan that works for you.

Figure out what your students need.

Instead of automatically covering everything there is to know about writing the college essay, take time to survey your students this year. How many students are planning to apply to four-year schools that require essays? How many students are planning to apply to state schools versus private schools? 

Knowing this information helps you make better decisions about how to maximize the limited time you have available.

It may also be helpful to ask students to tell you in advance what kind of feedback they want from you. This isn’t the time for students who aren’t applying to college to request feedback “just because,” and students who plan to ask another teacher, tutor, or family member for help don’t need to waste your time. It’s also helpful to have students indicate whether they want detailed feedback or merely a grammar check.

Do cover writing the college essay, but limit the class time you devote to it.

Given how important writing the college essay is for many students, how competitive college admissions has become, and how expensive outside help is, we do feel like it’s worth devoting at least a couple days to providing students with some basic information on writing the college essay. We want to make sure all of our students—regardless of background or income—have the resources to be successful.

But when you have other content to teach and not all students are applying to four-year colleges, it’s likely not something you can (or want to) devote extended time to. We’ve found that spending too much time on writing the college essay removes a sense of urgency from students who are applying and encourages students who aren’t applying to check out.

Offer occasional in-class work days or after-school workshops.

If you’re willing to give up some of your after-school time and have a school or district willing to pay you for your time, we recommend doing most of your college essay help in after-school workshops. Not only does this keep your class time free for your actual curriculum, but it tends to narrow your participants to those who care enough to carve out some extra time for it.

If this isn’t the case, we recommend blocking out a few days to conference with students and then moving on.

Set clear boundaries and communicate them to students.

Before college essay season begins, decide how much support you can provide to students. Decide when you will be available, when you will cut off support (we recommend before Thanksgiving), how many times you will give feedback on the same essay, and what kind of feedback you will provide.

As we’ve learned the hard way, not setting these boundaries allows college essay season to take over your life, and it’s a quick way to ruin the holidays for you and your family.

Remember what your actual job is.

Unless you’re specifically teaching a course called “Personal Statements,” remember that supporting your students in writing the college essay is not your full-time job (unless you want it to be). Don’t let students, parents, counselors, and administrators push you into feeling like it’s your responsibility.

Writing the College Essay in AP Lit: The Unit Plan That Worked for Us

We used to make writing the college essay a full unit in AP Lit and, as we mentioned above, provide unlimited help to students outside of class. Not only was this exhausting, but it tended to result in quite a bit of unnecessary work: students didn’t make the most of their opportunities for feedback, and we found ourselves buried in piles of writing assignments that had nothing to do with AP Literature.

By our final few years in the classroom, we had whittled our unit plan down to the basics:

We did devote two class periods to a lecture full of tips on writing the college essay. Our lecture covered the following topics:

• Purposes of the Personal Statement
  • The primary purpose of the personal statement is to put a person behind all the data in students’ applications. It’s an opportunity for the admissions officer to “meet” them and for the student to elaborate on a couple pieces of information they want to highlight.
• Choosing an Appropriate Topic
• What Type of Essay Is This?
  • Students need help understanding that the personal statement is a blend between narrative and expository writing that requires specific details and personal reflection.
• What Tone Should I Use?
• General Application Tips
  • While we didn’t spend much time on the full application process, we did remind students that senior year grades matter and that they should choose a major they’re interested in, not a major they (or their parents) think they “should” select.
• The UC Personal Insight Questions
  • Since we taught in Southern California, the majority of our students applied to the UC system, so we made sure to walk them through the prompts for that particular application.
• Responding to Short-Answer Questions for Private Schools
  • Private school essays can be a little intimidating for students, and it’s worth giving them a few pointers, particularly about the specificity needed for the “Why Us?” essay.
• Next Steps

We strongly recommend checking out (and referring your students to) the College Essay Guy. Your students have probably already found him online, but he has excellent resources for students and classroom teachers that we wish had been around when we were figuring out how best to help students.

For many years, we assigned informal brainstorming assignments to help students brainstorm ideas and “get their creative juices flowing.” Not only did few students give these assignments their full effort, but the grading load became impossible.

But we also found that, despite our in-class instruction, many students selected topics that were inappropriate, repetitive, or not particularly helpful to their application. After many years of commenting on final drafts that students needed to start over, we started providing students with the opportunity to sign up for a “prewriting conference” in mid-October, where they would share their plan: the four UC prompts they planned to address, their proposed topics, and any questions they had. 

We made it clear that we would not look at any drafts at this meeting: it was only to discuss their topic. We also made it clear that while the conferences were optional, students who did not attend one would not be allowed to make an appointment to discuss their final draft. This helped encourage students to take the assignment seriously from the beginning, allowed us to provide more meaningful feedback on final drafts, and indicated to us how many students we’d need to make time to meet with.

We also used to comment on students’ rough drafts, but this became an exercise in futility. We’d put in the time to comment on a hastily written draft only to have students tell us they just wrote that to get credit and it wasn’t their “real essay.”

Instead, we started to have students complete a rough draft, and then we gave them a self-edit activity, asking them to look for the kinds of “big picture” problems we often commented on in rough drafts.

Why a self-edit instead of a peer edit? Personal statements can be very, well, personal for students. Quite a few students write about topics they don’t want to share with their classmates, so we stopped asking students to do so. Of course, many of them did share with peers, but that was their choice, not a requirement.

On a related note, you may want to remind students that while they are welcome to write about anything they’d like, you are legally required to report any situations where they are being harmed, harming themselves, or harming others. This doesn’t mean students can’t write about these situations, but they need to know that there are limits on the confidentiality you can provide.

All students submitted a final draft for a grade. We created a rubric that incorporated the elements covered in our introductory lecture, and if students chose not to sign up for a conference, highlighting the rubric was the only feedback we provided.

Students who wanted additional feedback (and who had attended the “topic check-in” conference) had the opportunity to sign up for a one-on-one conference to receive verbal (not written—it takes too long) feedback on their essay. We still made notes of what we wanted to discuss, but we could write them more quickly when they were for us rather than the student.

For a couple years, we allowed students to sign up for one additional conference to discuss private school essays, but that approach ended up not being particularly effective.

Instead, we gave students the option to submit a private school essay rather than UC prompts as long as they discussed it with us first and the word counts were comparable to what other students were required to write.

While it still took some time and effort on our end, this approach allowed us to provide students with some support without allowing the college essay to take over our lives or curriculum.

5 Areas to Focus on When Providing Feedback

When it comes to writing the college essay, students need different feedback than we’re used to providing. 

As English teachers, we most often comment on line of reasoning and grammar. Over time, we moved away from providing grammar edits. Most students were not ready for that level of nitpicky edits after one or two drafts, and we started to feel uncomfortable with the level of rewriting involved with a detailed grammar edit. We want the essays to be students’ essays, not our essays, and with the increasing availability of tools like Grammarly, we felt better about keeping our feedback to content rather than style.

Instead, here are the five most helpful things you can address for your students:

For many students, the most valuable insight you can provide is helping them choose an appropriate topic.

Some students need to be directed to write about themselves rather than a family member or role model. Some students need to be reminded that they can write about their experiences in high school even if they’re “cliche.” Some students need gentle guidance in differentiating between what’s helpful for journaling and what’s helpful in a college application.

One of the biggest problems with college essays is that they’re boring. Students write in generic, expository terms about the “three things they’ve learned from playing/doing X,” and their essays sound just like every other personal statement you’ve ever read.

Students need to be reminded to use very specific details and to show rather than tell. Instead of writing, “I’m a dedicated person,” students should provide specific examples of them acting in ways that show they are dedicated.

While narrative elements should be included in a personal statement, some students go too far into creative writing, which means they tell a story without the personal reflection that shows why the story matters.

Many students are tempted to write about things that happened in elementary or middle school, which is rarely appropriate for a college essay when they are likely quite a different person. Colleges want to hear about what students are like right now.

Many students feel that they need to write a compelling tragedy to win admissions officers’ favor. While there are certainly difficult experiences in students’ lives that may be worth writing about, students need to emphasize how they have grown from the experience rather than the difficulty itself. Colleges want to see resilience and preparedness for the independence and responsibility of adult life, and if students give the impression that they have not yet overcome a personal struggle, the essay may hurt rather than help.

Writing the college essay is challenging and important, and our students certainly benefit when we provide support. But as English teachers, we have to set boundaries on the help we will provide to keep our fall semester from being entirely monopolized by the college essay process. It took us many years to find a balanced approach that allowed us to support our students without wearing ourselves out, and while it wasn’t perfect, we hope that it provides you with helpful ideas.

For additional information on college essays, consider checking out our podcast episode on all that “extra” stuff we have to handle in English, a YouTube video where we discuss college essays, our tips on writing a strong letter of recommendation, or our round-up of eight books on college admissions that we found particularly helpful. If you have questions about anything we’ve shared here, we’d love to chat with you at hello@threeheads.works or on Instagram @threeheads.works.