My Classmate Has The Same Application As Me??? (pls help)

BrehMement42
Fri, 06 Dec 2019 17:54:34 +0000

So I was casually describing my CommonApp essay to one of my classmates, when he tells his essay has the exact same plot and theme as mine! So we compared our essay, and although we’ve written it in completely different styles and mine had some more personal details in the middle, the failure itself and outcome we describe from the failure are EXACTLY the same, the conclusion is EXACTLY the same, the message is almost exactly the same, and some of our sentences look very similar.

Then we got to some more talking, and it turns out our major EC is also incredibly similar. They’re both about chess in education - I did a primary research project, he made an app, both involved underprivileged students (our CommonApp was not about anything related to this, which makes the similarity all the more astonishing). Then, we realized we’re both applying for the same major (Cog Sci). And now I’m reviewing over what both of our applications would like, and I’m scared it’s going to look identical.

More information: we’re applying from India (I guess that would increase the admissions officers’ skepticism regarding the validity of our applications), we both have the same first name initial and the exact same last name, we have extremely similar GCSE/AS results, my GPA is slightly higher than his and his SAT score is slightly higher than mine.

I’m totally fine if the admissions officers recognize our similarities and only accept one of us due to our similarities, but would they think that there we have plagiarised/fudged our application because they’re similar? Should we not be applying to any of the same colleges?

Thank you so much for any help regarding this.