JacobBlog!

They just noticed exactly 1 year later! 🙂 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/23/education/23college.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

The following was sent to application_help@commonapp.net on 12/23/09

Hello,
I am a professional web developer and have detected a significant error in the way character limits for essays are processed on the Common Application website. I also suggest a solution below, which I hope will be implemented in a timely manner.

Problem:
Many essays that meet the character limit are actually rejected upon clicking save.
What’s worse, the Common Application website gives the user a message that his or her essay is of acceptable length just below the submission box, and when it may be rejected.

For one of my essays, the Common Application website lists “Characters available 40” in the message below the submission box, but upon clicking Save, I receive the error message “The length of your response is longer than allowed by the application for this question. Please amend your answer and try again.” In fact, for any essay with more than one paragraph, the reported “Characters Available” (which counts correctly) is greater than the amount that will be accepted upon saving. This is a significant problem because any applicant who submits an essay with lots of short “one-liners” is effectively allowed fewer characters than other applicants.

Technical Explanation (To your IT department):
I believe that this error is a result of the way that the Microsoft ASP.NET server-side language is parsing line breaks. Line breaks are counted as a single character by your client-side JavaScript that generates the “Characters available” number. It counts only the “\n” (new line) escape sequence – this makes logical sense in terms of limiting the length of essays: one keystroke, one count. However, Windows servers treat line breaks as two characters; “\r\n” (“carriage return, new line”), and your backend software seems to count them as such. I confirmed that this sort of doubling was occurring by pasting a string of 899 line breaks preceded by 1 character and followed by 2 characters into an “1800-character” Stanford essay box. While on the front end, it listed “Characters available 898” (this is nowhere close to the limit), upon clicking Save, I was met with the error message (produced by the backend) “The length of your response is longer than allowed by the application for this question. Please amend your answer and try again.”
A rapid solution to this problem would be to, in the ASP.NET code, count the number of “\r\n” sequences that appear within the submission and subtract that from the initial character count value. This would cut in half the doubled count of new lines that occurs on the first pass.

Resolving this as soon as possible would save many applicants much consternation and likely avert a large number of complaints.

Thank you,
—
~Jacob Cole