That was my experience, too. Be careful--some of the boxes look like they'll let you go on longer than the character limit, but when you go to the "view" screen, the box truncates your essay wherever the limit was. Other secondaries will let you paste in the whole essay, but then will give you an error message when you try to submit it. Good luck!
you're worrying about not having enough space? I'm having trouble cooking up BS just to get close to the character limit! Is brevity bad in these supplementals?