If the Common Application had a face, it would have two black eyes and be missing a few teeth from millions of seniors taking out their rage on it.
As if senior year wasn’t already stressful enough with our Capstone projects, service hours for various honor societies, and college applications, the Common App just had to go and make it more difficult.
We’ve had to deal with problem after problem. First, we couldn’t add online recommenders. Then, once we finally added our teachers as offline recommenders, it wouldn’t let us make corrections or switch out teachers. If you’ve managed to get past these problems, you might have been especially unfortunate and been unable to login to your account for some unknown reason. Or some of your answers may not have saved.
If you’ve made it past this point, congratulations. Good luck submitting. You’ll probably get stuck on the “Generating PDF preview” screen of death. Once you finally get lucky and it goes through so you can see your preview, you might want to apologize ahead of time to your credit card. There’s a good chance that it’s going to get charged twice for submitting one application.
Oh, and before you click that final button you should cross your fingers. Many students were greeted with an error screen upon submitting their writing supplement to UVA. That’s exactly what we want to see after spending hours upon hours working on an application. Fortunately, despite giving students a heart attack, it appears that everyone’s writing supplements went through.
Some students managed to catch a break since many colleges like William & Mary and UNC Chapel Hill extended their early deadlines to compensate for the Common App’s failures. However, some of the schools WS students most often apply to like UVA, CNU, and Mary Washington did not, leaving seniors in a panic trying to juggle the end of first quarter and the horribly glitchy Common App.
It’s up in the air as to whether or not these issues will be resolved in time for the next round of deadlines on January 1st.
For the sake of the Class of 2015, I truly hope that the astounding amount of bad press the Common App has gotten will cause their board to hire competent programmers and save next year’s group of applicants the stress that we’ve had to deal with.
At least once we’re done with all of this mess we’ll be able to tell the next generation of college applicants how hard we had it. It can be our version of “back in my day, I walked to school in the snow.”