How do schools truly verify your volunteer hours?

Applying to College Common and Coalition Application
1

Do colleges even verify your volunteer hours. If they do, how? Do they contscryou? Do they contact your school? Im asking because for my volunteer hours I’ve put down that I helped clean the road that my school “adopted”/is located on and I said I spent a couple hundred hours on this over the 4 years of high school, which is true. However, my school doesn’t keep track of volunteer hours, so I don’t know how a college would verify it by contacting my school

I’ve heard the UC’s are the ones that really track down on this so if anyone knows how UC’s approach stuff like, please say.

2

They do not.

3

The point of volunteering is to help people, not to rack up hours. But if you’re asking if you can lie about the amount you’ve helped people (not saying you are) the answer is, yes, you’ll probably get away with it.

4

That is really sad to here. So people can just BS it and say they volunteered somewhere and boost their application?

5

Yes students can BS it the volunteering and I know students who have done it for NHS. Makes me just a bit angry.

6

My guess is that anything that can’t be verified will carry very little weight in the process.

7

My son’s school has required service hours and they are entered online. The program gives students an option to send a “service transcript” to colleges much like an academic transcript. DS has over 300 hours of verified volunteer service.

8

Unless your hours are obviously out of whack (“I volunteer 40 hours a week at X”), the will not be questioned.

9

If people can just BS there volunteer hours, I can’t imagine that volunteer hours carry much weight in the admission process.

10

That’s your responsibility anyway.

Volunteering is an EC. Colleges do not value volunteering any more or any less than any other EC, all of which have self-reported hours. So unless, as mentioned above, the hours are out of whack, no red flag will be raised.