Currently there are two tags that have the same function, however they are not set as synonyms:
Should we re-tag the "personal-statement" questions (only 7 questions) with the "statement-of-purpose" tag (177 questions). Or should someone with a higher reputation than myself, set these tags as synonyms to each other?
TL;DR: The personal-statement tag was created to represent a non-standard meaning of the phrase. Tags should be unambiguous words or phrases used according to their most common usage in an academic context. So let's synonymize personal-statement to statement-of-purpose, its most common usage.
The personal-statement tag was created by a user to distinguish questions about a "personal statement" required for graduate school admissions that was distinct from the "statement of purpose."
The problem, of course, is that "personal statement" is used more often as another term for "statement of purpose" than to refer to a different kind of statement. So the likely result of having two tags is that users will be confused as to how to tag questions, and we'll end up "splitting" questions about the same document into two tags - which is a bad thing.
For the reason stated above, I personally am in favor of making personal-statement a tag synonym of statement-of-purpose, and using statement-of-purpose for:
But that's just my opinion, we'll see what others think.
As someone who create the tag, I of course think it necessary to have a distinguished tag (in fact, 3 of 7 questions in personal-statement are mine). You can read the whole difference between these two statements in How to structure the personal statement?, but in short, in universities that require both, the SOP/research statement focuses only to your research, while the personal statement is only to tell about anything else that reveals you as a person.
If we synonymize them, we need to make sure that for questions that ask about this specific case, the answerers should be aware of this unusual. If we synonymize them, and when the asker has specifically told what meaning they are mentioning, the answerers find no problem with that, then I happy to have them synonymized.
Unfortunately, this is not the case. In the linked question in paragraph 1, you can see that the top voted answer (not the accepted one) had mistaken the concept, even when I had told what meaning I used (to be fair, I didn't add the note line at first). The number of vote indicates that not only that answerer, but also the voters mistook that too. Answers are pearl, so an off-topic answer is badly wasteful.
>> That's not the fault of them, after all there is no agreement among the schools. Some separate the two, some don't. For who lives in the latter, we need to educate them that there exists the former. And there is no way to teach about something better than creating a noun, a name, a concept, a category for it. We cannot see the blue color, unless we have a name for it. We also don't have any bias for people who have pendulous earlobes, because we don't have a name for them.
So this case, I propose to keep the tag. All it needs is the detailed description below.
