What’s New in the Common Application? A Brief Outline

A Little Bit of Background

* 4.5 million applications were submitted last year, with an average of 4.8 per applicant. 22 million recommendations were submitted.

* Top states for students who submitted the Common Application last year were New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. Ten percent of submissions were from international students.

What’s New:

Membership: New members include a number of state universities, such as the University of Oregon, University of Wyoming, University of Northern Colorado, University of Western Michigan and Ken State University

The Application

* Courses and Grades Module in which students can self report their high school academic records. It’s an additional section in the menu. Some colleges will require it and some not. For the coming year, 12 members will be using it. Their names have not as yet been announced.
* Google Drive Integration. Students will be able to use the contents from their Google Drive accounts of up to 2000 KB, an increase from 500 KB. The integration supposedly will be improved.
* Essay Prompts. Some of the former prompts have been revised, and two new ones have been added. There is a return to the Topic of Your Choice prompt, which had been removed when the Common App revised the system a few years ago.
* New Activity Choices. Internship and social justice will now appear in the drop-down menu as new categories to explain students’ activities.
* Recommendations. It now should be easier to resend a recommendation request.
* Application Review. Students can invite up to three advisors (parent, counselor or anyone else) to review the status of their applications. They can revoke the privilege and restore it, as well. Advisors will not be able to make any changes in the applications.
* Roll Over of the Application. This isn’t new but it’s important to know that an account created up to and including July 24, 2017, will be rolled over to the coming application season. July 24th is the date that the system shuts down in preparation for its relaunch on August 1.

To learn more, you can access the Common App blog, http://www.commonapp.org/whats-appening, or watch the resources and training documents at www.commonapp.org/ready.