Common App Section by Section - Submitting Your Application
Ensure a seamless submission process with this guide to completing your Common App.
Submitting Your Application
Congratulations! If you’ve made it this far in the Common App, it means you’ve -
Completed information sent to all colleges where you’ve chosen to apply - Profile, Family, Education, Testing, Activities, your Personal Statement (essay), and Courses & Grades
Completed information specific to each college where you’ve chosen to apply - College Questions, Supplemental Essays, and Recommenders & FERPA.
Whew - that’s a lot! The good news is that you’re almost over the finish line.
The final steps to Submitting Your Application -
Review your entire application
Pay the application fee (if required)
Verify your application is complete
Most important is Step #3.
Your application isn’t complete until you have verified - with each college - that they’ve received all required materials.
Review Your Entire Application
You will submit your completed applications one college at a time via the “Review and Submit - Common Application” tab for each college or university.
The Common App will generate a PDF with all the information each college will receive. Review your completed app for both comprehensiveness and accuracy.
Some colleges and universities won’t receive all the information you’ve entered into the Common App. If any section won’t be sent to a college - because the college is not asking for it (a common example is Social Security Number) - you won’t see this information included in your PDF preview.
Pay special attention to the formatting of your writing section and look for any unnecessary or distracting spacing issues, typos, missing capitalisation or punctuation. It can be easy to introduce these mistakes accidentally when copying / pasting your essays into the Common App. Catch them and correct them so that college admission officers see your best work.
NOTE: If you do not see the option to review your completed application, it probably means you haven’t completed a required section. Check back through your Common App to ensure that every section on the Common App tab and every section under the specific college you’re applying to have a green check mark indicating completion.
Pay The Application Fee
Most colleges and universities charge a small application fee, typically under $75 (per application). You will need a credit card to pay this fee.
NOTE: If you qualify for an application fee waiver, you’ll see this on the confirmation page. If you are not seeing a waiver and believe that you should, talk to your school counsellor to get assistance (typically, your school counsellor indicates in the Common App system that you should receive a fee waiver).
Once you’ve paid the application fee, you’ll be asked to sign and submit the application.
Verify Your Application Is Complete
A submitted application (yay!) does NOT mean a completed application.
Look for an email from the college or university.
Most have their own application tracking portal where you’ll login to check the status of your application from now on (you won’t really use the Common App anymore once you’ve submitted your application). Colleges usually send you instructions on how to login to their portal within a day or two of receiving your application.
Your application isn’t complete until *all* required information is received.
Some application information - such as letters of recommendation, transcripts, and official SAT/ACT test scores - is sent to schools outside of the Common App. And it is your responsibility to ensure that the information is received on time.
The deadline for “required materials” is usually a week or two later than the deadline for receiving your application, giving you time to chase down and submit this info.
Examples of information that you’ll need to ensure is submitted by the materials deadline (which is often times later than the application deadline):
High school profile [talk to your counsellor]
Official high school transcript [talk to your counsellor]
Counsellor recommendation [talk to your counsellor]
Teacher recommendation(s) [talk to your teachers]
Any other recommendations [talk to the recommenders providing these]
Official SAT / ACT scores [submit through College Board and/or ACT directly]