I'm not sure I buy the GP argument. Would anyone really care if it was a few characters over? Their character counter includes line breaks, so arguably we could use the additional characters for formatting to improve the readability of the essay, thus making the job of the person reviewing the essay easier.

I do agree that it probably wouldn't work, as they likely already have code in place to trim quotation marks & ect. so they probably threw in a filter too.
Either way, we're under 2500 characters, so I'm not trying anything funny. Good luck to all who are applying!
