Tips for filling out Common Application (courtesy of Dr. Haddy)
* EVERY student (documented and undocumented, regardless of their family’s financial situation) qualifies for 8 application fee waivers (because all students on campus participate or are eligible for Free/Reduced Price lunch).
#1 – click My Colleges tab
#2 – All of the light gray tabs (Future Plans, Applicant, Demographics, Family, Education, Academics, Activities, and Writing) only need to be filled out once. That info will automatically be sent to all of the colleges on the student’s My Colleges list.
#3 – After they finished the Education tab, they will be able to access the dark gray School Forms tab. Make sure students fill out the school forms tab as soon as possible. This tab is what generates the email to the counselor to prepare/submit their transcript and the email to the people who will be doing their letter of recommendation.
#5 and #6 – the last two things are the Signature and Payments tab
o For the 5th through 8th schools, you should select the option to pay with a College Board Fee Waiver. The College Board Fee Waivers are actual paper forms that are delivered in August with the first batch of SAT fee waivers. (They are a half sheet of paper and each year they are a different color.)
o Students need to fill out everything on the form, and give it to their counselor to sign… one form for each school.
o It is the students responsibility to then mail those fee waivers to each school (they can find the address for each school’s admissions office on their website). If students don’t mail in the waiver, it is like they never submitted payment – which means they will be denied
o Some schools have no application fee – those school don’t count toward the 8 fee waivers, so students can apply to as many of these as the want.
* EVERY student (documented and undocumented, regardless of their family’s financial situation) qualifies for 8 application fee waivers (because all students on campus participate or are eligible for Free/Reduced Price lunch).
#1 – click My Colleges tab
- Search for the colleges you are going to apply to.
- You can list all 8 colleges now, or just start out with 1 or 2 and add more later
- Once you add the colleges, you will see them listed in boxes across the top under the ‘My Colleges’ tab.
- When a college is selected, it will list all of the components of the application
- A green triangle means that part is done. An orange box square means it has been started, but not finished, and a red triangle means it has not been started.
#2 – All of the light gray tabs (Future Plans, Applicant, Demographics, Family, Education, Academics, Activities, and Writing) only need to be filled out once. That info will automatically be sent to all of the colleges on the student’s My Colleges list.
- Future Plans tab – make sure that the you are clear about the difference between the different deadline options. Along with the regular deadline, many schools have early deadlines – Early Decision I, Early Decision II, and Early Action. If a student want to meet an early deadline (which they will be able to do with the early start to the year), they need to be clear about the requirements for each early deadline. Some of the early deadlines are binding (if we accept you, you have to go here), some are just early notification (if you get your app in early, we’ll let you know early – but you aren’t locked into going here).
- For the essay (Writing), I would recommend having the students use the essay that they wrote for Prompt #1 for the UC application. On the Common App, the students select the essay topic ‘Topic of Your Choice’ and then paste their UC application.
#3 – After they finished the Education tab, they will be able to access the dark gray School Forms tab. Make sure students fill out the school forms tab as soon as possible. This tab is what generates the email to the counselor to prepare/submit their transcript and the email to the people who will be doing their letter of recommendation.
- In this tab the student will enter in the name and email for their counselor and all of the people who will be writing their letters of recommendation.
- After the students enter this info, they still need to go to each individual school and indicate which recommenders they would like to use for that school’s application. (Recommenders only write one letter, regardless of how many schools the student ends up applying to.)
- Explain to the students that it is common protocol that when asking for a letter of recommendation that they waive the right to see the recommendation (they have to answer this question here).
- Some of the supplements are simple forms that can be filled out in a matter of minutes, others require addition short answer/essays that need to be written up – which will take the students a little bit more time to complete.
#5 and #6 – the last two things are the Signature and Payments tab
- The Signature tab is where students do the actual submitting of their application. The way that it is set up, students can submit all of their applications at the same time, or they can submit them piece by piece. (If a student finishes all of the general light gray tabs and one school has a short or no supplement and another has a supplement that requires additional essays – they can submit the application for the school with no supplement now and then go back later to submit the 2nd school when they’ve finished that essay.)
- The payment tab is where students indicate how they are going to pay for their application.
o For the first 4 schools that they apply to, you should select the option to pay with a NACAC fee waiver. Students don’t need to submit any paperwork with this – counselors will need to verify the student qualifies for a NACAC waiver when they submit the students’ transcripts.
o For the 5th through 8th schools, you should select the option to pay with a College Board Fee Waiver. The College Board Fee Waivers are actual paper forms that are delivered in August with the first batch of SAT fee waivers. (They are a half sheet of paper and each year they are a different color.)
o Students need to fill out everything on the form, and give it to their counselor to sign… one form for each school.
o It is the students responsibility to then mail those fee waivers to each school (they can find the address for each school’s admissions office on their website). If students don’t mail in the waiver, it is like they never submitted payment – which means they will be denied
o Some schools have no application fee – those school don’t count toward the 8 fee waivers, so students can apply to as many of these as the want.
- On the Application – some schools require you to do the Signature page first, and then the Payment page – and other schools require you to do the Payment page first, before you can submit the Signature page. There is no way to tell which schools want which way. Just try one way and if it is wrong, they’ll get an error message saying that they need to do the other thing first.
- If you are going to apply to one school on the Common App, you may as well apply to 8. Teachers and counselors only have to fill out each form once, regardless of how many schools the student is applying to (so it isn’t increasing the burden on them), and the only additional work for the students is the supplements for each school (and mailing out the College Board waivers if they apply to more than 4 schools).
- Students will have 6 weeks between the start of school and October 1st when the CSU and UC applications go online. This should be plenty of time for them to finish all of the Common App.
- The other advantage to doing these early is that it gives the counselors and teachers more time to fill out their forms/recommendations – and not be rushed to do them all the last two weeks before Winter Break.
- Many schools on the Common App do rolling admissions, so if the students get their apps in before Oct 1st (and the teachers/counselors do too), then they might start hearing back from schools as early as November.