Many applicants are judged almost exclusively on their spelling.

What is the Antecedent?

An antecedent is what a pronoun refers to. The pronoun in this sentence is "their". It refers to applicants.

As you may know, the antecedent of a pronoun is the noun to which a pronoun is referring in a sentence. Thus, if we look at the sentence, "Many applicants are judged almost exclusively on their spelling," we’ll need to first identify the pronoun, which in this case is "their." Because "their" is a plural pronoun, we know we are looking for a plural noun. However, in this case things are a bit easy because there is only one noun in the sentence-"applicants." As such, "applicants" is the antecedent of pronoun "their."