Let's be real: No matter what your Common App looks like or what you've written in your personal essays, getting accepted into US universities and colleges is a total crapshoot (unless, maybe, your parent donated a building). That being said, there are still some very straightforward reasons as to why an applicant gets rejected. To find those out, u/impeccableflaws asked college admissions officers, "What is the worst reason you chose not to accept a student?" Here are 20 of the best — or worst — ones below:
1. "The worst case I've seen is a kid openly admitting in his application essay that he was a habitual cheater throughout high school — but it taught him how to become resourceful and think outside the box."
"I've never seen an application get denied faster."
2. "I'm a teacher. One student I worked with had his acceptance to Stanford rescinded. He was a low-income minority student with an excellent GPA and ACT scores. On paper, he was a talent and diversity score for schools. When he got his acceptance letter, he tweeted at Stanford something like, 'Fuck, yeah, I got in.' That prompted them to click on his Twitter, and they saw all this fucked-up shit about misogyny and drug use."
3. "I rejected a student who applied to our PhD program to work with me because she plagiarized my paper in the personal essay of her application."
"Who does that?"
4. "I once visited a college my brother was interested in. The admissions officer must have been having an awful day, because he proceeded to go on a full-blown rant, saying, 'If any of you write a college essay about a tragic event in your life, it has to be tragic. An essay about how you moved in your sophomore year of high school to another state and no longer had friends with you — that is not tragic! If it's supposed to be a tragedy or huge overcoming, it must be a tearjerker. Every time I see an essay about overcoming a lame obstacle, it instantly hits the bin.'"
"Needless to say, my brother did not attend."
5. "'When I was young, my grandfather often took me hunting for peasants.' He meant pheasants. To be fair, this was a Princeton application, so for all we know, he might have also meant peasants."
6. "Graduate school admissions here. Our application requires four separate essays. This student wrote all four as a long, drawn-out love letter to one of our faculty members. The faculty member wasn't taking new students into the lab and had never met or talked to the prospective student. Nevertheless, the student had taken all the info for her love letters from his website and provided a list of his publications (also from his website) that she had read. I walked away from reading her application with zero sense of who she was but having learned much more about the faculty member!"
7. "I'm a college financial aid counselor in the US who works with our admissions staff. Some students don't realize that if you receive federal student aid at one school, other schools can see this on various national databases, like the National Student Loan Data System. Several years ago, a high school student with decent grades was selected for additional documents. She completed the process but just seemed off. During our awarding process, we discovered that she attended other schools previously and received aid — several years' worth. That right there — lying on the admissions app — is enough to get the boot. The real shocker is that she was 26."
"She was lying not only about school but also about her age. She said she was 18 on the app. She came in to see about her package, and we directed her to her admissions adviser. She said, 'OK, I'll be right back!' I said under my breath, 'Oh, no, you won't.'
"Following up with admissions, I asked how it went. The counselor said, 'Good, right up until she started crying and walked out.' So, transfer students, do not lie or leave out info about prior attended schools on your app — we will find out."
8. "An admissions officer at the College of William & Mary once told me about this student who had submitted a beautifully written essay. It was well written, emotional, and error-free. Overall, it was a fantastic essay. The admissions officer was just about ready to accept her right there when she saw that at the end of the essay, the student had written, 'And that's why I want to go to UVA.'"
9. "We had a kid once send in his own worn and slightly smelly shoe, along with a note that said, 'Hope this helps get my foot in the door.'"
"It didn't."
10. "I attended a top three school and worked closely with the admissions office. Once, a student just starting his senior year of high school — who hadn't even begun applying to colleges — became obsessive and decided it was his right to attend the school. He lied to his parents, said he'd been admitted into a special program, took a four-hour bus ride to campus, and pretended to be a student. He made friends, convinced desk workers that he'd lost his dorm key card, slept in various people's rooms after making a variety of excuses as to why he couldn't stay in his (roommate was mean, allergic to something, etc.), and hopped from one dorm to the next after being found out. He went so far as to find a girl with a disability and convince her that the school had assigned him to her as an official note taker, and he would use her as his 'in' to lectures."
"I believe he reasoned that if he attended classes there for a year, he would undoubtedly get in because he'd be able to prove that he could do it. I think he was on campus for almost a week and a half. He planned to stay for the entire year and attend classes.
"Admissions had their eye on him for a while before this. He was active in the admitted students' Facebook group (even though he hadn't applied), and nobody could figure out his deal. When they started getting reports about this sketchy, compulsive liar on campus, they put two and two together and tracked him down.
"They found him and contacted his parents. He was escorted off campus by two police officers who traveled with him to the bus station to send him home. They informed him that there was a standing order for his arrest if he ever stepped onto school property again. And that was that. Instant (future) rejection."
11. "This is a verbatim email I received from a prospective student, with only the school's and basketball player's names redacted: 'I think u were at my school and u r from [school name]. I have some questions first. I took the ACT and got a 17 but a 23 in math, what scholrships does that get me? do you have classes with [star basketball player]? Hes so dope. I wanna study biochemistery and cure cancer. I really want to go to ur school. But im gonna go on my own terms.'"
12. "My mom is an admissions counselor. The worst story I've heard from her is about an outstanding student with a top GPA, top test scores, and a good essay — except my mom had never heard of their school. She searched and couldn't find anything on the school (odd), so she typed in the address on Google Maps. She found an abandoned school that no one had attended for years."
"Kid forged the entire application. I thought it was impressive, but she did not. Instant deny."
13. "I'm an admissions counselor for all of our Chinese applicants, so you can imagine I get a lot of interesting essays, some of which look as if they're either straight from Google Translate or written by a paid consultant. One essay I read recently was from a girl who wrote about her experience volunteering in a nursing home. I thought this would be the typical 'I'm awesome because I made a difference' essay, but it turned into softcore porn."
"The girl began writing about giving an older woman a bath (whom she called her 'pet'). She also described, in detail, how she rubbed the skin back and forth, including the 'floppy crotch.' Floppy crotch. Just imagine that visual."
14. "I was on the admissions committee at my med school. One time, we had an applicant whose personal statement started out saying, in all seriousness, that he wanted to be a doctor because a doctor's white coat or a surgeon's scrubs are aphrodisiacs."
15. "I rejected an applicant to our (science) PhD program because he said he 'didn't believe in data' during our interview."
16. "A college speaker at my high school told us that they once received a letter of recommendation written by a teacher for an outstanding student. She was kind and hardworking and got good grades. She also babysat for the teacher, so obviously, this teacher had no shortage of good things to say. However, after the letter had been sent in, the college got a call from the teacher, who took back everything she said in the letter and told them not to consider the student."
"Why? Because she caught the student stealing from her house."
17. "I work in another department at a college, but I've heard some great stories from our admissions counselors. My favorite is about one girl who was actually admitted, and then the department's social media person followed her on Twitter. Her profile picture showed her smoking a blunt in front of a pile of coke. Scrolling through, they saw a very graphic picture of her fellating someone."
18. "I worked in a graduate admissions office in college. We once turned away a woman who would call the office every day to ask us questions about the program that we could not disclose — average GPA/GMAT of the class accepted so far, job placement rate, etc. This was a brand-new program; the first class hadn't graduated yet. Eventually, we rejected her because her résumé wasn't as built out as those of some of our other applicants."
"We did look at her application with a slight bias. When we rejected her, she flipped a switch and actually came into our office to scream at us."
19. "In a program about Common App essays, the university I wanted to attend told us the story of a particular applicant. He mentioned the cable show Dexter in his essay, then ended his essay with something along the lines of, 'I would definitely become Dexter and kill bad guys.'"
"Needless to say, he was rejected."
20. "Someone wrote a lovely and extensive essay on how they wanted to go to Vanderbilt — for an application to American University in Washington, DC."
Did this make you feel any better about your own college applications? Or did it remind you of a story of your own? Let us know in the comments below!
Note: Some responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.