Features

What's inside every critique.

Most essay tools give you a score. We hand you a full strategic dossier — built from rubrics written from each school's published criteria, with the same per-axis breakdown, simulated committee read, and revision tracking that a $400/hour coach would produce.

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Free preview: overall score, verdict, prompt fit, the simulated committee read and one rubric criterion. Full critique $79. Account needed, no card.

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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.

Each school's rubric is written from its published evaluation criteria and current essay prompts. 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

Harvard Business School · overall 88 / 100

Specificity · 15%9/10
Concision and voice · 15%9/10
Answers the specific prompt · 25%9/10
Reflection and self-awareness · 20%8/10
Business-minded / leadership / growth evidence · 25%9/10

From the sample critique (unedited). Sample essay written by our team for a fictional applicant. Critique generated by MBA Essay Critic, unedited.

AdCom room dialogue

Hear the room argue about your essay.

We simulate a short committee conversation (a skeptic, an advocate and a tiebreaker) 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

Simulated committee read

Skeptic: It’s a solid story, but I worry it’s a bit small-scale for HBS—is fixing a freight desk enough evidence of leadership potential?
Advocate: He didn't just fix a desk; he recognized his own hubris and actively stepped aside so 'Ana' could lead, which shows rare maturity.
Skeptic: I agree the 'nobody used it' moment shows great self-awareness, but he spends a lot of time on the spreadsheet logistics.
Tiebreaker: The quantifiable drop in missed pickups combined with the selfless act of recommending his subordinate for a lead role wins me over.

From the sample critique (unedited). Sample essay written by our team for a fictional applicant. Critique generated by MBA Essay Critic, unedited.

Cohort percentile

Know where you stand vs. other drafts graded here.

A score means more with context. We show where your score sits among other critiques graded on this site for the same school. This is not admissions data — it is a relative position only.

Compared with other essays graded here for the same school
Shown once enough essays exist for that school
Not admissions data — a relative position only

Single essayApplication cyclePremium

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

Cliché scanner

Catch the phrases that make an essay sound generic.

"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 fast

Single essayApplication cyclePremium

Naturalness check

Sound like you, not like a chatbot.

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

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 three fixes

1Identify the specific 'regional freight brokerage' by name to ground the story in a real workplace.
2Briefly connect the 'investment in others' to the broader business goal or the 'force for good' concept in paragraph 4.
3Tighten the 'break room' interaction to make the dialogue feel less like a movie scene and more like a professional turning point.

From the sample critique (unedited). Sample essay written by our team for a fictional applicant. Critique generated by MBA Essay Critic, unedited.

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

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

Portfolio coherence

Audit your essays as a set.

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

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

Run the full critique on your draft for $79.

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

Get my free preview

Free preview: overall score, verdict, prompt fit, the simulated committee read and one rubric criterion. Full critique $79. Account needed, no card.

See pricing