When you submit an application electronically through the common app, do Admissions officers read directly from the common app or do they print out the entire application onto paper? Or do the secretaries do that? Just want to clear up some cloudy waters here…
I believe the norm is to read the apps online.
hmm… Im thinking that reading the apps online would probably be easy for the admissions officers, but what happens when the applicant decides to update information by email or mail, or when recommenders mail things in? Wouldn’t the applicant’s app be printed out to add these supplementary things in?
I can give one example anecdotally: when my daughter was applying in 2007, her EA school was an early adopter of reading apps online and their practice was to scan anything that came in via snail mail and add it to the electronic file. I couldn’t say for certain that all colleges do it the same way, but I recently watched a youtube thing from the Brown Admissions office and they mentioned that they read everything electronically.
This still varies by school. Not everyone has gone all electronic. But I can’t imagine this matters to anyone except the staff that used to have to assemble paper files by hand.
scanning hardcopy materials is the norm in business. Online cabinets allow multiple readers to access from remote locations. It’s difficult to imagine all submitted docs not being scanned and uploaded, to be frank.
What about schools that only consider CR+M SAT scores? I gather the Common App lists CR, M, and W scores, so would these schools simply enter CR and M a database along with the rest of the info on an application, while ignoring the writing scores? Is the Common App actually a data dump to the schools’ IT systems? Or do they just give readers a hard copy of the same Common App we see as a preview, and tell them to ignore writing when looking through it?
^ Interested in the answer to this as well.