Regardless, it’s not an actual limit in the sense that your response will be cut off after 500 words…admissions officers just don’t want to have to navigate through five pages of text.
If you’re fifty of seventy-five words over, I say don’t fret. Sure, look for things that you could cut out, but don’t do so unnecessarily.
Two pages, double-spaced, is a good guideline.
Furthermore, it seems like Scott Anderson has made contradictory statements regarding the wording:
-“After a four year experiment with no maximum essay size, we are simply returning to the practice of the prior 31 years in specifying a 500-word maximum…Since there is no magic number that would be acceptable to all, we returned to our historic 500 word limit, which allows an applicant approximately two double-spaced pages to express their thoughts and writing skills.”
-“When the new wording of the Common Application was published this spring, I wrote to Scott Anderson at the Common App, and he assured me that there is NO word limit on the main essay on the Common App, despite the wording of ‘250-500 words.’”
I honestly don’t know what to make of all of this, and will probably just end up contacting the schools I’m applying to in an attempt to decipher this.