The Common Application, which has been in use since the 1970s, enables a student to fill out a single application for multiple colleges. The number of schools accepting online applications has more than doubled in the last decade and includes nearly all of the nation’s most prestigious institutions. The company now processes well over one million applications a year.
This year’s application was designed and built from scratch, in an effort to make it simpler to use, with a newly standardized supplemental form that can be adapted to each college.
Unfortunately this new version of the online Common Application has been plagued by numerous malfunctions putting admissions offices weeks behind schedule and causing panic amongst thousands of students trying to meet early admission deadlines.
Problems became evident as soon as the application was released in August, the company has been frantically trying to fix the problems over the summer and fall and have indicated that the number of applications is up 20% over last year indicating that high school students were able to navigate the system successfully.
The recent problems mean that college admission offices will have to work overtime to go through applications, and some plan to take on temporary extra staff. But they say they still intend to send out acceptance and rejection notices on time in mid-December.
With the bugs being resolved, they expect the larger regular round of applications — usually submitted by January deadlines, with replies sent in the spring — to go more smoothly.
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