Most colleges reuse their supplemental prompts year to year. The ones that change them rarely announce it — the new question simply appears on the Common App in August, and last year’s advice quietly goes stale. This is what actually moved for the 2026-27 cycle, verified school by school against each application as it went live.
Schools that dropped their supplement entirely
The most consequential kind of change, and the easiest to miss: if you are working from last year’s notes, you may be drafting an essay nobody will read.
Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Removed its supplemental essay entirely. The Common App personal statement is now the only essay WPI reads. Confirmed directly by WPI Admissions.
Stevens Institute of Technology
Dropped its long-running “Inspired by humanity, powered by technology” supplement. No school-specific essay remains.
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Dropped both all-applicant essays — the 250-word “Why RPI” and the 300-word extracurricular. Only five specialized programs (Physician-Scientist, Architecture, Electronic Arts, GSAS, Music) still require writing.
The biggest structural change we found. UW retired its bespoke 650-word essay — which replaced the Common App personal statement rather than supplementing it — and now requires the standard Common App personal statement like everyone else.
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Dropped its community essay, leaving two prompts.
Removed its required supplemental essay. The Common App writing requirements for Carleton now list the personal essay as required and exactly one optional college question — the 250-word “Anything missing?” box. The former relationship prompt is gone, which means there is no longer anywhere in the application to argue why Carleton.
2025-26“Think about someone you connect with who’s different from you. What do you find most meaningful about your interactions with them?” (required, 300 words)
2026-27No required supplemental essay
Suites that were restructured
These schools kept a supplement but rebuilt it. Word counts, prompt counts, and in some cases the underlying question all moved.
Went from a six-part suite (three essays plus three short answers) to four required essays. The “three words” and one-sentence “Why Brown” short answers are gone. The Open Curriculum essay was fully rewritten around President Paxson’s 2025 Convocation remarks, Teach a Class was promoted from a 100-word short answer to a 100–150-word essay, and Joy tightened from 200–250 to 100–150 words. PLME changed from 500w + 250w to three 250-word essays.
Restructured from five essays to four short-answer essays (~100–200 words) plus four new 40–50-word short responses. The Pleasure Activity and Collaboration prompts were removed; a new “problems you’d tackle and who you’d work with” prompt replaced them, and the field-of-study question was reworded.
Went from four prompts to five, reworded all of them, and switched from word limits to character limits. The new fifth prompt asks about “learning by study and by faith.”
Retired the imagined-conversation essay. Replaced with a 50-word question about a bold question you’d ask, plus a 250-word prompt about a woman who excels at bringing people together.
Collapsed two required essays plus one optional into a single optional “changemaker” essay.
Prompts retired and replaced
A prompt disappeared and a different one took its place. Reusing last cycle’s draft here means answering a question that is no longer being asked.
Retired the Presidential Speaker A/B choice in favor of a single required short answer on values. The nursing supplement went from 800 words to five to ten sentences.
Retired its two-part prompt for a single question.
2026-27“Why is Syracuse a good match for your interests and goals?”
Retired the George Eastman prompt, replacing it with an experience-driven question about curiosity and creativity.
Reworded its University Honors Program prompt. Same curiosity-to-action theme, but the new version explicitly asks what you learned about yourself, others, or the world. NC State also states the response should be no more than 600 words, with no minimum, and notes the same prompt is used for its Park Scholarships Program.
2025-26“Tell us about an event, realization, or project where your curiosity inspired you to take action…”
2026-27“Think about a time when your curiosity led you to not just learn, but to act… What insights about yourself, others, or the world did you take away?”
New requirements added
These schools asked for more writing than they did last cycle.
Added a required 100-word “Why Wake Forest?” essay, plus four optional prompts to choose one from.
Added a 150-word “what caught your eye at Elon” question, bringing its Think Fast section to four prompts.
Added a 250–350-word Honors Signature Course essay for Honors and Presidential Scholars applicants.
The one-word changes
The most dangerous category, because the prompt still looks familiar. A single substituted word can change what a reader is grading you against — and a changed word count can invalidate an otherwise finished draft.
Added a single word to its background prompt — and it shifts the ask from group identity toward personal specificity.
2025-26your background
2026-27your individual background
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Swapped the institution’s name in the goals prompt.
2025-26…after graduating from Illinois…
2026-27…after graduating from UIUC…
Rotates the weekday in its whimsical fill-in each cycle. Still figurative — it means any recent ordinary day.
2025-26“My favorite thing about last Monday was…”
2026-27“My favorite thing about last Tuesday was…”
Added a floor to its “Your Voice” essay. A 300-word answer that passed last year is now under the minimum.
2025-26500 words or fewer
2026-27400–500 words
Tightened its list question and dropped the “A hallmark…” preamble from the lived-experience prompt.
2025-26“a selection of the books…”
2026-27“the titles of the books…”
Dropped the “Principles of Community” preamble from its second Ut Prosim prompt.
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Its second-choice-major prompt gained a lead-in sentence.
2025-26“Please explain your interest in your second-choice major…”
2026-27“You have selected a second-choice major. Please explain your interest in that major…”
Clarified that its Paideia essay has no lower bound.
2025-26200–500 words
2026-27up to 500 words
Deadline moves
Prompt changes get attention; date changes quietly reshape your calendar.
Regular Action moved from January 5 to January 4.
Regular Decision moved from January 1 to January 4, 2027.
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Regular Decision moved from December 1 to January 5, 2027 — a full month later.
University of Illinois Chicago
Early Action moved from November 15 to November 2, 2026.
How this was compiled
We maintain guides for 180 colleges. Between August 1 and September 2, 2026, we checked each school’s supplemental prompts against its live application — the Common App writing section for that school, or the school’s own portal where it does not use the Common App — and compared them line by line against what we had recorded for 2025-26.
Prompts here are transcribed, not paraphrased. Where a school had not yet posted its 2026-27 questions, we waited and rechecked rather than carrying last year’s forward, because a stale prompt shown under a current-year label is worse than no prompt at all.
This list covers substantive changes — a supplement dropped or added, a prompt retired or replaced, wording or word counts altered, deadlines moved. Punctuation-only edits and schools whose prompts carried over unchanged are not listed. We have excluded a small number of reported changes we could not confirm against an official source.
Found something we got wrong, or a change we missed? Tell us — we will verify and correct it.
Check your own list
Every school above links to its full guide, with the exact 2026-27 prompts, what each one is testing, the failure mode readers see most often, and weak-versus-strong score benchmarks. Browse all 180 guides →