MBA Essay CriticMBA Essay Critic
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Features

Eleven tools behind every critique.

Most essay tools give you a score. We hand you a full strategic dossier — built from the rubrics admissions officers actually use, with the same per-axis breakdown, committee-style adcom transcript, and revision tracking that a $400/hour coach would produce.

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Which features come with which plan

The feature × plan matrix.

Every plan ships the full critique. Cycle and Premium unlock the multi-essay, cross-school tooling.

Feature
Single essay
$79
Application cycle
$199
Premium
$299
Per-axis rubric score
AdCom room dialogue
Cohort percentile
Confidence interval
Cliché scanner
Naturalness check
Top 3 fixes
v1 → v2 compare
Story Bank
Portfolio coherence
Branded PDF export

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Per-axis rubric score

Scored against the actual rubric — not vibes.

Former admissions officers reconstructed the rubric each school uses internally. Your essay gets a 0–10 score on every axis plus an overall /100 — so you know exactly which dimension is dragging the rest down.

  • Axes match the school you picked (HBS leadership, GSB self-awareness, etc.)
  • Each axis shows the score, the weight, and what moved the needle
  • Re-grading the revised draft uses the same rubric — scores stay comparable
Single essayApplication cyclePremium
HBS critique · overall 76 / 100
Leadership impact8.5/10
Self-awareness7.0/10
Analytical aptitude8.0/10
Community citizenship6.5/10
Strategic fit7.2/10

AdCom room dialogue

Hear the room argue about your essay.

Real admissions decisions get made by committee, not by a single reviewer. We simulate that conversation so you see where someone would push back, where someone would defend you, and which version of you the chair walks out remembering.

  • Advocate quotes the lines that earned your seat at the table
  • Skeptic flags the lines that would lose it
  • Chair delivers the one-line verdict the rest of the room agreed on
Single essayApplication cyclePremium
The room · 3 voices

Advocate

"The Lagos pivot in paragraph 3 is real leadership — concrete numbers, real stakes."

Skeptic

"She tells me she led — I want to hear why she's the one we admit, not someone else who did the same."

Chair

"Strong candidate, soft middle. Land the 'why HBS specifically' and we're in."

Cohort percentile

Know where you stand vs. accepted essays.

A 78/100 means nothing without context. We show your percentile against the cohort of accepted essays for the exact school + round you're targeting — so you can tell the difference between "safe" and "on the bubble."

  • Per-school distributions built from verified admit drafts
  • Updated as new cycles complete
  • Reflects round (R1 vs R2) where data is sufficient
Single essayApplication cyclePremium
GSB · accepted-essay distribution
You · 84th

Your 82/100 sits in the 84th percentile of accepted GSB Round 1 essays.

Confidence interval

An honest score has error bars.

If the model isn't sure, it tells you. You'll see whether your 78 is really 76–80 or 70–86 — and what to fix to tighten the range.

  • Interval reflects rubric-axis variance + prompt-fit ambiguity
  • Wider bands flag essays that read differently across re-reads
  • Re-grading after a revision visibly narrows the band
Single essayApplication cyclePremium
Score with confidence interval
78
overall · /100
095% CI: 70–82100

Cliché scanner

Catch the phrases AdComs are exhausted by.

"Passion for impact," "changemaker," "my why." Every adcom has a list of phrases that signal a shallow essay. We flag yours and suggest swaps tuned to the school's actual language register.

  • Detects MBA-essay clichés, hedge phrases, and stock metaphors
  • Swaps are tuned to the picked school (Booth ≠ HBS voice)
  • Quotes the exact sentence so you can fix it in 10 seconds
Single essayApplication cyclePremium
3 clichés flagged

  • "I have always been passionate about social impact."

    → Open on the Lagos vendor who took your call at 2am.

  • "My why is to be a changemaker."

    → Name the change. In one sentence. Today, not in 10 years.

  • "I want to be at the intersection of…"

    → Pick a lane. Booth reads 800 'intersection' essays a cycle.

Naturalness check

Sound like you, not like a chatbot.

AdComs increasingly screen for AI-generated essays. Our naturalness check combines burstiness, lexical variety, and AI-tell phrase detection, then highlights the specific sentences that read synthetic — so you can humanize them before submitting.

  • Hybrid scoring: heuristics + targeted LLM sentence review
  • Per-sentence flags with reasoning
  • Re-runs after every revision — track the score climbing
Single essayApplication cyclePremium
Naturalness · 64 / 100
64
Reads partly synthetic. 3 sentences flagged.
"In conclusion, my experiences have shaped me into the leader I am today."
"It is important to note that this challenge taught me resilience."

Top 3 fixes

Three changes, ranked by score impact.

Most critique tools dump 20 suggestions. We rank them by predicted score impact, show you the top three, and tell you which paragraph each one lives in. That's all most users need to make a draft jump 8–12 points.

  • Ranked by simulated score delta if you apply the fix
  • Each fix names the paragraph and the specific sentence
  • Acts as the to-do list for your v2 draft
Single essayApplication cyclePremium
Top 3 fixes · ranked by impact
  1. +6Replace abstract paragraph 2 with the Lagos scene.
  2. +3Cut the opening cliché — start at the inflection point.
  3. +2Name the GSB-specific course or club, not just 'community.'

v1 → v2 compare

See exactly how your revision moved the score.

You revised. Did it actually help? The compare view shows axis-by-axis deltas, which strengths you kept, which weaknesses you killed, and which new ones you introduced — so revision becomes data-driven, not vibes-driven.

  • Hero shows overall score delta (+ / − points)
  • Per-axis arrows for every rubric dimension
  • Strengths/weaknesses bucketed into new, gone, kept
Application cyclePremium
v1 → v2 delta
Overall
71 → 83
+12
Leadership7.0 → 8.5
Self-awareness5.5 → 7.2
Strategic fit6.0 → 7.8

Story Bank

Stop re-inventing your story for every essay.

Most applicants tell the same 5 stories badly across 10 essays. Dump everything once — leadership moments, failures, identity beats — and we extract atomic "story cards" with dimensions, strength scores, and source quotes. Then we recommend the right cards for each prompt.

  • Free-text intake of your background and key moments
  • AI extracts dimensioned story cards (impact, vulnerability, originality)
  • Per-essay recommendations: which stories to deploy, which to hold back
Application cyclePremium
Story Bank · 7 cards extracted

Lagos pivot

9.2

Impact · Vulnerability

Sister's diagnosis

8.7

Identity

Failed Series A

8.1

Failure · Self-awareness

Free Tibet mural

6.4

Originality

Portfolio coherence

Audit your whole application like an AdCom would.

AdComs read your essays as a set, not in isolation. Once you've graded ≥2 essays for a school, the portfolio view scores narrative arc, surfaces redundant stories (good vs bad), flags contradictions, and lists the dimensions of you that are missing across the whole application.

  • Narrative-arc score across the full application
  • Repeated stories tagged as reinforcing vs. redundant
  • Missing-dimensions checklist tied to that school's rubric
Application cyclePremium
HBS · 3-essay portfolio

Narrative arc · 82

Strong throughline. Identity → action → reflection lands cleanly.

Repeated story

Lagos appears in essays 1 and 3 — overlap reads redundant, not reinforcing.

Missing dimension

No "community citizenship" beat. HBS weights this heavily.

Branded PDF export

Download a polished critique — share or print it.

One click turns your critique into a branded PDF you can hand to a counselor, share with a recommender, or print for your own notes. Includes the full essay appendix so the artifact stands on its own.

  • Cover page with school, prompt, author, and date
  • Score hero + per-axis bar chart + strengths/risks
  • Numbered next-steps and full-essay appendix
Single essayApplication cyclePremium
essay-critique-stanford-gsb.pdf

Essay Critique

Stanford GSB

"What matters most to you, and why?"

82
Strong

Run all eleven on your draft for $79.

No subscription. One credit, one essay, the full toolkit.

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