Getting into the college of your choice is a big factor in what you do during your junior and first half of senior years in high school. You work hard to keep those grades up; you take the ACT or the SAT a couple of times to get the best score possible; you try to stay or become involved in as many activities as possible in order to demonstrate your well-roundedness; you volunteer in the community to demonstrate good citizenship.

When you write an essay for an English course, you are usually given a rubric by which the instructor will evaluate that essay and come up with a final grade. In effect, your instructor is using the same process that you will use when you have to evaluate something and write an essay on that evaluation.