Effective Immediately: Changes to the Common Application!
If you are preparing applications for admission and you plan to use the Common Application, you need to be aware of changes to the form (and its use) effective immediately.
On Friday, October 19, Rob Killion, Executive Director of The Common Application, announced that “students will again be able to create and submit alternate versions of their Common Application, in much the same way they did last year.” Killion further points out the “the feature will ‘go live’ overnight this evening (Friday), and be available over the weekend and through the end of the current admission cycle in June.”
Killion acknowledges that, at this critical juncture of the application process, there are bound to be questions: How can you access this feature? What if you have already submitted your Common Application to all of your colleges? How will this affect your ability to articulate an academic interest or an intent to apply for financial aid at different schools? To answer these and many other questions, the Common Application has posted an FAQ on its website:
http://www.commonapp.org/CommonApp/Docs/AlternateVersionTechnologyFAQ.pdf.
This is an important development for users of the Common Application (CA). The primary advantage of the CA is the opportunity it affords students to use a single application form in applying to multiple institutions that are members of the Common Application group. Prior to this year, students had been able to customize the form for submission to each of the schools to which they were applying. For example, it was possible to make unlimited copies of a CA after it had been submitted, then edit the copies before resubmitting them to other colleges. According to Killion, “The ‘copying’ feature was added a few years ago in an attempt to help early applicants (ED/EA/REA) who were denied or deferred, and wished to submit an updated RD (regular decision) application to another set of colleges.”
Expressing concern that this tendency by students was not consistent with the original intent of the CA and that students were, instead, encouraged to use supplemental forms to submit as much college-specific information as they’d like, the CA had eliminated the customizing feature on the 2007-08 form.
As you can see, the CA membership has, in response to concerns raised by guidance counselors, revised the rules regarding the use of the Common Application. I would advise you to visit the CA website to learn more about how these changes might affect you.
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