<p>For the most selective colleges, does it really make a difference? All my counselors tell me colleges view them exactly the same yet I can't help but feel skeptical since far less applicants use the individual application. Is it even remotely possible that they get some sort of advantage over those who don't? Considering the two have different essay questions, would seeing different responses slightly impress the admission officers, especially after reading thousands of other similar ones?</p>
<p>Does anyone really know much about the weights of the two applications? I know member colleges of the Common App swore an oath or whatever but it is their decision after all. Since they aren't allow to openly admit their biases if there is any, has anyone really experienced different results with different applications?</p>
<p>You’re straw grasping. All of it gets scanned and dumped into electronic files. To confer advantage of one of the the other would have no utility whatsoever.</p>
<p>“has anyone really experienced different results with different applications?”</p>
<p>and how would any applicant be able to tell you this???</p>
<p>There’s a very simple reason why they all tell you this: it’s true.</p>
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<p>Those numbers aren’t about the superiority of a college’s own application over the Common App. They’re completely about convenience. There’s less redundancy for the applicant if he or she uses the Common App and then simply completes supplements for individual colleges or universities that require them.</p>
<p>I will say this, though. When my daughter was applying to college, she did encounter one unusual instance in which it was advantageous to use a university’s own application instead of the Common App.</p>
<p>She was applying to a university–something of a safety, really–that she liked, but for which she was perhaps somewhat overqualified on paper. This university was known to value an applicant’s demonstrated interest in the school very highly, and not infrequently to wait-list or deny highly qualified applicants who seemed to be using the university as a safety. This university took the Common Application and didn’t require a supplement. Sweet deal, right? But if you filed the university’s own application, you were asked to write a “Why [name of university]?” essay, and if you filed the Common Application, you weren’t (because there was no supplement). So even though she was filing the Common Application for other universities, she filed the university’s own application, so that she could use the “Why [name of university]?” essay to demonstrate her interest in [name of university].</p>
<p>In the end, she was admitted and offered a pretty generous merit scholarship. She ended up choosing [name of supposed safety] over several other universities, including the one that we’d all kind of thought all along was her Destiny. And since she’s been there, as far as I can tell, she’s been having fun, making friends and doing her homework. So, happy ending.</p>
<p>But, as I said, that’s a pretty unusual case. Colleges and universities themselves get enough Common Apps that they’re quite used to evaluating them, so they really don’t mind your using it at all. And even in my story, the university didn’t care one way or the other which form my daughter used. She chose to file the university’s application because she had a preference, not because the university did.</p>