@cougar123–You can wait two weeks and if you haven’t submitted it by then, just send a quick email to your regional rep saying that you had planned to submit the research at the same time that you sent your application but then you decided to do some extra work on it. Then provide the new submission date.
@Sally_Rubenstone thank you so much!!! You have no idea how much stress you saved me. I didn’t want colleges to think that i was intentionally misleading them when it was just a careless error… Thank you again
@cougar123–I think that you and a lot of students worry that college folks will view small errors as intentional deceptions. So I want to assure ALL of you that the default setting for most admission officials is that mistakes are simply mistakes. The typical admission officer doesn’t believe that a student has purposely tried to trick them unless there’s clear evidence that this is so.
This process is stressful enough without fretting that small mistakes will be viewed as deceit!
Thank you for taking the time to help us during this process. I saw a mistake in the EC section, so of course I’m stressed and wondering if to contact the AO. This was not a Common App. In listing my activities, I listed the same activity twice. I was involved in National Charity League and had many volunteer opportunities to list. Based on spacing I couldn’t get it all in on under NCL, so had to separate a few out to different line items. Since I was trying to fix it, I made a separate line item for one, but forgot to remove it from the original NCL line that has three other things listed with it. I also mixed up the dates as I put the years I was involved in NCL correctly, but then for the line item that I duplicated I put the exact dates for that event. I’m worried it looks like I’m trying to get credit twice for this, but it was an honest mistake. Do I need to contact the AO? Thank you again.
@watergirl17–Let this one go. It’s likely that the admission folks won’t read the application closely enough to catch your minor goof. And even if they DO, they’re just going to view it as a small error made during a stressful time. As I pointed out above, the admission-officer default setting is NOT, “These kids are out to cheat and deceive us.” Instead, it’s the opposite. The admission folks view little screw-ups like yours as merely mistakes. They feel, as Freud did, that,“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” 
Thank you for getting back to me. I definitely felt better after reading your posts to others, but you know how it is. I felt somehow, my situation was different
So I put in the wrong financial information in the CommonApp. I put my father as employed while in our tax returns, he is unemployed. I also listed my mother’s occupation wrong.
Also, my school just emailed me today to say that we shouldn’t use our guidance counselor as our counselor but instead use our college advisers.
In the same email, they gave me my class rank and class size, where I previously left it blank.
Should I email Columbia (the only school that I sent in the application already) about the corrections?
@balabooboo -Yes, because you have so many changes to make, I think you need to bite the bullet and send the email and then just make sure you make the changes on your Common App so you’ll be all set when–or if–you apply elsewhere.
@Sally_Rubenstone I accidentally messed up the date for two AP exams. I accidentally switched the years for an exam taken junior year and an exam that I’ll be taking in the future. So one exam says a score and 2017, and the other says 2016 and no score. Also, I’m applying to be a public policymaker with a concentration on health. I accidentally put future career interest as Physician. Do you think that’ll negatively affect my chances if my EC’s show my interests? I don’t want to come across as another kid who wants to be a doctor.
@h99999 -Ordinarily I’d say to leave the AP mix-up alone but, given that you’ve also messed up on the career choice, I suggest that you send a brief email to the regional rep (at any college that’s already received your application) that rectifies both of these snafus. It will be especially useful to clarify your career goals, and–while you have the admission official’s attention–you might want to mention a few of the specific courses at his/her college that you plan to take to get you to your goal.
If you don’t know who your regional rep is, first look on the school’s admission pages and, if that fails, just telephone the admission office.
Hi Sally,
Thank you so much for taking the time to answer our frantic questions! Something that has been on my mind is that after I submitted my early application to a school, a blurb on the Common App says that my application may not be complete without my portfolio submission, as I had indicated on one of the questions that I intended to send to a portfolio. However, I ended up mailing in materials rather than using SlideRoom online, because they did not have the category for my kind of work.
My question is if I do not contact my admissions counselor about this, will they simply throw out my application because it is “incomplete” without the portfolio? Thank you.
@AsianStudent101 -You’re probably fine but, in this situation, you’d still be wise to email your admissions counselor and explain exactly what you’ve said here just so that there’s no confusion about why your application might be marked incomplete and, above all, so that your admissions rep will be sure to know that there are materials that came via snail mail. In many admission offices those materials aren’t stored with the application files so it will be helpful for you to alert your counselor.
I made three grammatical errors in one paragraph in a supplemental essay. These include ‘interest with (x program)’ rather than ‘interest in’, forgetting a comma at the beginning of a sentence, including an inadvertent ‘as’ in a sentence, and putting “I my academic interests” at the beginning of my closing sentence. Should I send an email to the admissions office with a corrected essay? I already submitted my application so I am unable to go back and change it. Thanks for any and all assistance!
Thanks for the advice you’ve been giving out students. I just recently submitted my common app and unfortunately noticed two mistakes I left in. One is that I said the year I entered high school is one year earlier then the year i actually enrolled (wrote 2012 when it should’ve been 2013). Second mistake is that in the activities part of the common app i accidentally listed one job i had as taking up 20 hours a week. While it only took up 12 hours a week, which is what i wrote in my activities resume that i also submitted. Are both, either, or neither of these things worth responding to the admission counselors about? Thanks.
Hi Sally,
DS made a major blunder on his supplemental essay. The question asked why he would like to attend xyz. The engineering school won a competition years ago for constructing a green building on campus. Lets call this building “abc.” A few years later, the team entered another contest with another building. Lets call the second building “def”. The second building is no longer on campus. DS got the buildings mixed up and referenced the wrong building in his essay.
He also has a second error. In one of his essays, he writes about an award he received and the date which he applied for this award. Unfortunately, his date is off by several months. I’m sure his counselor will mention this award as well. Would it look strange to the AO if the dates are different as reported by the counselor or would they chalk it up as just a minor error/memory slip?
I wanted to add DS wrote, " I’d like to attend xyz, because of the “def” building I saw on my tour." He should have said building “abc.”
I submitted my Early Action a few days before my transcript finished processing and available for viewing. I realized today that my GPA was a 3.64 not my reported one of 3.67. What should I do? Should I send them an email or wait it out? Will the change (if done) affect my admissions chances in terms of honesty or preparedness? Thank you in advance.
Hi Sally,
I just realized that I made a pretty big mistake on my common app. I submitted my EA application to Harvard two days ago and just realized that for one of my activities I put 16 hours a week instead of 6 hours a week! This makes my total hours a week 40.5-50.5 instead of 32.5-40.5! Should I email the admissions officer explaining this, since 40.5-50.5 hours a week sounds really unreasonable for a high school student? Thank you.
Hey Sally,
I submitted my Stanford application on Sunday; however, I now realized I forgot to include my Science Olympiad participation and a first place award in Astronomy in my activities portion. At my school, we include Science Olympiad with the Academic team, and I included the general academic team in my activities section, so should I email the admissions office and inform them that our academic team includes Science Olympiad?
Also, in addition, I said I was taking the SAT on Nov. 5th, but now I have qualified for a State Cross Country meet on the same day. So now I am taking it in December. (It’s for National Merit, not necessarily Stanford.) Should I also include this
Thank you.
Hi Sally,
I recently applied to a University which does rolling admissions, but forgot to add in my unweighted GPA. I swamped myself with college applications and submitted 4 in one day, (which wasn’t too smart looking back). I’m honestly freaking out, because someone told me that unweighted GPA’s are just as important as weighted. How bad will it look if I email admissions to provide the information?
I’m so conflicted right now because this is my dream school on the line, and I feel like I’ve completely ruined my chances over something like this. The worst part is I triple checked, yet still managed to forget that one detail.
Thank you in advance 