UCAS Personal Statement Length Checker
Please note: The line count may differ than the number of lines in the textbox above but when copy and pasted will match the line count on the UCAS application.
UCAS Personal Statement Requirements
- No longer than 4000 characters.
- No longer than 47 lines.
- Each line can be no longer than 94 characters. (Our character counter above already has a max line length of 94 characters unless otherwise noted.)
- Characters include spaces, carriage returns, and punctuation.
To see additional features including word count, paragraph count, space count and more use the character counter on our home page.
How to write your UCAS personal statement
The UCAS personal statement scares most high school students. Writing a perfect personal statement is a strenuous and unavoidable process. With roughly about 6 million university applications each year, officials need a method for filtering stronger applicants from everyone else.
As challenging as this task may appear, it is also your only chance to share your personality and eligibility for the degree program you have chosen. Follow our practices given, and you can absolutely make your personal statement up to the mark.
Start with a plan
Each year thousands of applications are received for the best degrees in the world and are best focused on the goal of making their application stand out from the rest.
Thus, planning out what you want to say prior to writing your UCAS statement makes it easy to write a convincing personal statement. Start off by making a rough draft, answering some questions like
- What subjects do you want to study?
- Why have you particularly chosen this path for yourself?
- What makes you think that you are best suited to study this degree program at the college?
Some of these points will form the backbone of your personal statement, so write them in a manner that makes sense to you.
Sometimes you want to create simple bullet points or use mind maps. No matter what you decide; your goal is the same. You want to clarify why the university should provide you with a spot.
Bigger Picture of the Degree
Talk about the course that you have applied to. How did you learn about it in the first place? What means did you use to deepen your interest and knowledge in this area?
It would be a huge plus to list the books you read and the meetings you have attended regarding the subject.
Please elaborate on your academic attitude towards the degree. What are your goals after graduating? What role will it play in helping you achieve your greatest ambitions? What sort of vocation plans do you have after graduation?
Write about your work experience and achievements
Your previous achievements are an essential part of your personal statement. Think about all the accolades you have received and the contests you have participated in. These can be in-school, national or international. Both academic and sports awards can greatly help emphasize your commitment.
Write about the important skills and experiences acquired elsewhere (such as hobbies) that can be chained to the degree of your choice.
Remember, you are searching for experience that shows why you need to study the subject that you have chosen. You are not just writing an essay about what you are doing in your high school syllabus.
Extracurricular Activities
Your extracurriculars ought to likewise be included in the personal statement. Whether it be a MUN or a cross country race, they pass on the message that you love participating in different events.
Likewise, it is really smart to discuss any expertise you have acquired through extracurriculars.
Discuss any leadership roles you could have held, as they improve your capacity to appreciate people on a profound level and put you across as a pioneer.
Community service is a plus in the UCAS statement as it shows a promise to a reason bigger than oneself.
You can link all these activities to your selected course in the best case. Be careful not to elaborate too much on extracurricular activities.
UCAS Character Count
There are some specific instructions for your personal statement that you can never ignore.
First, it must not exceed 4,000 characters or 47 lines of text (including blank lines), whichever comes first. If you do exceed this, the university will not get your entire statement.
So make sure your personal statement has a solid and decisive ending. It will look bad if you cut it off in the middle of a sentence after realizing that you have exceeded the text limit.
Instead, give each section proper attention, time, and character to plan your essay thoroughly.
However, while you are getting everything rolling, you ought to overlook these restrictions.
Tips for reducing the character count
From the get-go, you simply need to jot down all that you feel is significant. You will probably wind up with something very lengthy, but that is okay.
This is where you get to do some polishing and trimming. Maintain the focal point of your piece on the course you are applying for, why you want to do it and for what reason you are impeccably fit for it.
Glance through what you have composed until now - do you have the right balance? Cut off whatever continues a little to far, as you want to keep each point crisp and concise.
It is a difficult process to try to keep as much content as possible while keeping the character count low, so here are some simple ways to make it easier for you.
Avoid quotes
Read your personal statement and eliminate platitudes if there are any - for instance, 'I've wanted to study psychology since I was young'…The same goes for the quotations: except if they increase the value of your statement (which they don't most of the time!), it is really the best practice to remove them.
Make sure everything is concise
For each sentence in your piece, use the "so what?" rule. Does this sentence appear to be more reasonable for the course? If not, cutting it is best. This frequently happens when individuals write too much about their extracurriculars in a frantic endeavour to fit everything in. For extra analysis, feel free to use our sentence counter to calculate the average length of your sentences.
Colleges, notwithstanding, need to see a reflection and what you have extracted from your encounters; this implies it is normally better to simply discuss a few extracurriculars than to list many things that the reader is likely to skim.
Also, note that you don't have to use hospital or volunteer location names. This further allows you to remove the last few characters from the count.
Use colour coding
An easy way to see where you are losing most of your characters is to highlight the sections of your statement with different colours.
Check your language
We frequently invest a great deal of energy looking up big words with the expectation that it will make our work impressive. However, this isn't generally the best practice. It is, in many cases, best to cut these words for fundamental and engaging sentences.
I hope the process will now be transparent, and it will be more exciting for you as you embark on your writing.
How to use our UCAS personal statement checker
To use our tool simply copy and paste your personal statement into the text-box above.
At the top, you will see two metrics displayed. The first metric on the left is the total characters you've typed out of the limit of 4,000 characters.
The second metric on the right is the number of lines your text contains out of the max of 47 lines. The UCAS allows a maximum of 94 characters per line, which our line count feature already takes into consideration.
To make it easier you can click the green "copy text" button to copy the text in the text box. You can also click the red "clear text" button to delete all the text in the text-box.
Why use an online UCAS personal statement checker?
Reason number one: The character count feature in Microsoft Word will not give you an accurate reading. The reason is that Word does not count the carriage return (also known as the enter key) as a character while UCAS does count it as a character.
The problem is that this will cause Word to underestimate the character count. This could cause your essay not to be able to submit when you try to upload it. If anything it would be better to overestimate the word count on Word that way it will fit.
Our personal statement checker however will give you the same character count as UCAS unlike the Microsoft Word character count.
It can be helpful to see the character count in real-time as you are typing your personal statement. This way you are constantly reminded of how long your essay is.
If you are not paying attention it can be easy to lose track of how long your essay is and go over the limit.
Our tool makes it easier to be aware of the length and easy to cut back if necessary.
How many characters in a personal statement?
UCAS requires 4,000 characters in their personal statement. Use our personal statement checker above to see if your essay meets the requirements.
How many words in a UCAS personal statement
UCAS has a character limit of 4,000 characters. This equates to about 615 to 800 words.
How many words is 4000 characters?
4,000 characters is about 615 to 800 words. For more Characters to Words conversions, check out our Characters To Words Converter .
Does the personal statement character limit include spaces?
Yes, it does include spaces as well as carriage returns. Check your statement with our personal statement checker above.
Thanks for using our UCAS personal statement checker!
We appreciate you taking the time to check your personal statement using our webpage. As you know, this is a very important college application essay to get into British universities. UCAS stands for Universities and Colleges Admissions Service and is what the UK uses for the college application process. Good luck on your personal statement!