><i>“A capital W takes up 10 times the space of a period,” he said. “If a student writes 163 characters that include lots of Ws and m’s and g’s and capital letters, their 163 characters are going to take many more inches of space than someone who uses lots of I’s and commas and periods and spaces.”</i><p>><i>Asked why the problem had not been fixed, Mr. Killion said, “Believe me, if there’s a way to do it, we’d do it. Maybe there’s a way out there we don’t know about.”</i><p>... TeX has been doing this for <i>years</i>. Clearly, their preview does it for them, as it cuts things off where it should. <i>They have a solution staring them in the face</i>. What the hell?
"Mr. Killion said the issue of “truncation,” as it is known within the Common Application offices, is not new, and had been a reality of the process for more than a decade..."<p>More than a decade? Everyone in that office needs to quit and never work anywhere again.
That is seriously embarrassing, but the attitude of "OMG there is no way to fix it!" makes me appreciate the rates that qualified consultants charge.<p>It is in no way an impossible problem to limit it by physical size if it's being printed in a standard format, but apparently it seems that way to some.
Jeesh, the kid goes through so much trouble generating press and says this:<p>"It's kind of ridiculous," he said. "I take computer science. I have a vague idea of how this may or may not work. I think it would be just such an easy thing for an error message, at least, to pop up."<p>So much for taking advantage of the opportunity.<p>Common App is an awful piece of software and there are many places for improvement. There is definitely room for a startup in this space, and the article proves that common app isn't going to put up a fight.
I think it's a overflow issue. The print preview flows the text in some box on a page, and if you have lots of wide characters it gets cut off because they didn't anticipate the max y-height 150 words can consume.<p>The Times was a bit imprecise in how they used the kid's words to explain the bug (about par for their technical reporting, unfortunately). The way they write it, it sounds a lot like <textarea maxlength=1000></textarea>, but if you think more about the explanation of the wide characters and the "print preview" it can't be that.<p>Overflow issues are actually not trivial to fix, as opposed to the claims some people are making here about "just count the words". Without allowing an excessive amount of space or allowing for more flexibility in the way it lays it out (flowing across multiple pages, etc.), it can be hard to estimate how much space to give for something as vague as a 150-word limit. If the Common App instead specified a 1000-character limit, the programmer/designer could take the widest character like "W" and determine the max y-height for 1000 W's.
Situations like this make me sad. 1000 characters is not the same as 150 words. It's very easy to strip out punctuation and then count the number of words in a string. Really really careless.<p>I love the quote:<p><i>Asked why the problem had not been fixed, Mr. Killion said, “Believe me, if there’s a way to do it, we’d do it. Maybe there’s a way out there we don’t know about.”</i>
Higher Education Software sucks mightily for the most part. It's way too rigid and often, the cost of customization is prohibitive for offices working on a certain budget. Also, for some reason, common sense in decision making is not a factor many a times as far as Higher Ed IT goes.<p>I work in higher ed and often see quotes for doing very simple things to be in hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars. The integration of software from different vendors is a nightmare as no one really provides any sort of an API and such customizations usually end up being ugly hacks since the vendors would charge exorbitantly for doing the same. Also, there's rarely a way to successfully propose a change due to the investment in legacy software and sunken costs. Not to mention the crappy SLAs that the vendors provide.<p>As far as issues like wordcount, it could be something as trivial as changing the parameters on the backend for the system to accept X+Y characters for validation instead of X but still advertise the X character limit on the front end.
The whole problem is caused by what I consider to be a larger problem: They're trying to print the damn things.<p>In terms of collaborating with others to form an opinion on an applicant, an online no-print system sounds better, more flexible and less prone to these types of problems.