High school seniors who are applying to any of more than 500 colleges that use the Common Application have reported technical difficulties with the system, such as the garbling of text in their essays and the non-receipt of payments that lead to the false belief that the applications have been submitted, the New York Times reported last week.
Now with less time left until college early acceptance deadlines hit, the Common Application organization says most of the problems have been worked out, although several still show a status of “in progress” on the Common Application website. But more importantly, enough uncertainty exists that colleges have extended deadlines, created alternative application process flows, and taken other steps in a frantic spree to accommodate the technical problems with the application’s newest release, only offered online, which is premiering this year.
[See comment below] We’ve emailed the communications office at the Common Application in order to try to get more definitive answers about what happened and, I hope, what you might do to make sure your application made it to its intended destinations in good form. But until they respond, we want to make sure you double check your own applications. For example, some reports say the signature page for credit card payments can take a very long time to come up, which might lead you to close the browser before your payment is processed. If you did this, you might think your application has been submitted and is on its way to the university when, in fact, it isn’t. Check both the online application system and your credit card statements to make sure the payment was processed and the application submitted. Also check that you only paid one time.
Second, some students have reported, based on the buzz on Twitter, that the essays are garbled and don’t resemble what they typed in, especially if they copied and pasted from Microsoft Word. Again, we can only advise you to double check your applications, print them out, view them in a different browser—for example, if you normally use Internet Explorer, try to see what the application looks like in Chrome—and so on.
Finally, stay informed about the admissions deadlines at the colleges to which you have applied. Go to their websites regularly during this process, since there are glitches this year, and different colleges are responding in different ways. Many colleges, such as Northwestern and the University of Chicago, have extended their early acceptance deadlines because of the technical problems with the Common Application. Others, such as a few in Minnesota, have reportedly created alternative applications. Others have made it easier for high schools to use hardcopy because of communication problems between the Common Application and Naviance, which high schools use to send transcripts and other documents to colleges.
“There’s always anxiety approaching deadlines, but this has been on a different scale,” the Times quoted Christoph Guttentag, dean of undergraduate admissions at Duke, as saying. “We’ve been getting a lot of emails, a lot of phone calls, from students and counselors and teachers, who were feeling very challenged by the process.”
“It’s been a nightmare,” said Jason C Locke, associate vice provost for enrollment at Cornell University, in an earlier Times story. “I’ve been a supporter of the Common App, but in this case, they’ve really fallen down.”