premed202 Posted October 1, 2014 Report Share Posted October 1, 2014 Did you guys actually follow the instructions and not copy & paste essays directly from word, and instead write them out on the application itself? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
robclem21 Posted October 1, 2014 Report Share Posted October 1, 2014 I copied and pasted, but then had to go back through it because all apostrophes and quotations were omitted. Aside from the that, formatting was alright. edit: I still think this is less of a chance of making mistakes than re-typing everything. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lolelol Posted October 1, 2014 Report Share Posted October 1, 2014 I copied and pasted, but then had to go back through it because all apostrophes and quotations were omitted. Aside from the that, formatting was alright. edit: I still think this is less of a chance of making mistakes than re-typing everything. Oh man if there aren't clear indications that there's a formatting error (some websites change apostrophes and commas to å and ö and other funky letters) then the reader might think you don't know basic English. I think I'll retype. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
heythere1110 Posted October 1, 2014 Report Share Posted October 1, 2014 Wouldn't u be able to see those though if you edit it again after pasting? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rmorelan Posted October 1, 2014 Report Share Posted October 1, 2014 Wouldn't u be able to see those though if you edit it again after pasting? yes, but the issue is that word carries over all their hidden format commands. You can get around this by bouncing off another app that removes them - notepad did that for instance - or by changing very carefully after. Bottom line is you of course don't want those annoying extra characters. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MathToMed Posted October 1, 2014 Report Share Posted October 1, 2014 I pasted and saved everything in notepad first, then pasted it into the OMSAS box.There was an issue with "Word Wrap" when I did this (it would put many extra hard return strokes in) so I had to take off word wrap when copying. Then it would paste in just fine. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
heythere1110 Posted October 1, 2014 Report Share Posted October 1, 2014 yes, but the issue is that word carries over all their hidden format commands. You can get around this by bouncing off another app that removes them - notepad did that for instance - or by changing very carefully after. Bottom line is you of course don't want those annoying extra characters. Did we have a character limit or is it just the 250 word limit that's important? My character values it displayed varied for each essay. I recall seeing rules about the character limit somewhere (it may have just been the 150 character limit for ABS list), so now i'm a bit worried. Does anyone know if you go over the character limit in the ABS essays/personal essays then would it just stop you/not allow you to save? I'm worried I went over the character limit b/c of focusing on only the word limit and copying/pasting into the app. :/ My brain is a bit cloudy now though, so I don't remember. Also....one of my essays turned out to be 251 words haha! I don't know how i missed that It's silly I know, but you don't think that will negatively affect me do you? *is paranoid* It was a useless word too! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mala Posted October 1, 2014 Report Share Posted October 1, 2014 yes, but the issue is that word carries over all their hidden format commands. You can get around this by bouncing off another app that removes them - notepad did that for instance - or by changing very carefully after. Bottom line is you of course don't want those annoying extra characters. so to clarify - if you edited your docs after pasting them in and removed any special characters, you shouldn't have a problem? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MathToMed Posted October 1, 2014 Report Share Posted October 1, 2014 Did we have a character limit or is it just the 250 word limit that's important? My character values it displayed varied for each essay. I recall seeing rules about the character limit somewhere (it may have just been the 150 character limit for ABS list), so now i'm a bit worried. Does anyone know if you go over the character limit in the ABS essays/personal essays then would it just stop you/not allow you to save? I'm worried I went over the character limit b/c of focusing on only the word limit and copying/pasting into the app. :/ My brain is a bit cloudy now though, so I don't remember. Also....one of my essays turned out to be 251 words haha! I don't know how i missed that It's silly I know, but you don't think that will negatively affect me do you? *is paranoid* It was a useless word too! The character limit was 2000 characters (any more and you literally could not enter anything else into OMSAS). I also wouldn't worry about hitting 251 words. It seems unlikely that UofT would hold that against you, given they pride themselves on holistically evaluating everyone. so to clarify - if you edited your docs after pasting them in and removed any special characters, you shouldn't have a problem? Correct. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
heythere1110 Posted October 1, 2014 Report Share Posted October 1, 2014 Thanks. ALso, there is no word count indicated on the app and different programs give different word counts. Like pages, word, and google drive docs, all give different values. So, it's very confusing. The 1 word over is actually just a hyphen, since i manually counted 250 words, but the program counted the hyphen cuz i added an extra space when editing in the app. Oh well. Officially deleting this from my memory and moving forward with life haha. thanks for your response Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sepehr Posted October 3, 2014 Report Share Posted October 3, 2014 I just reviewed mine and I have missed quite a few of the apostrophes in my essays. How much of an impact is this going to have? Will I get flagged? I want to cryyyyy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Almighty Saguaro Posted October 3, 2014 Report Share Posted October 3, 2014 The character limit was 2000 characters (any more and you literally could not enter anything else into OMSAS). I also wouldn't worry about hitting 251 words. It seems unlikely that UofT would hold that against you, given they pride themselves on holistically evaluating everyone. Correct. I previously emailed one of the admissions reps and was told: "Our recommendation would be to follow the instruction on the OMSAS application and in the OMSAS instruction booklet and to adhere to the 250 word limit as indicated." I don't know if this was just one of those email responses where the author feels the need to give the official answer even though in real life there's more leniency. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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