Hi all. Not posting this in the particular school’s forum because we don’t want to pick on them publicly, but my D is distressed to be getting e-mail from one of the schools she applied to, saying her application is incomplete. The message says her transcript and ACT score are missing. It is a Common App school and she submitted the application the night before last (Oct 28). Took longer than others because she needed to do an extra essay for Honors Program consideration.
We know the transcript was submitted via Parchment - we have a confirming e-mail stating it was received by that school on Sept 25. Similarly with the ACT score report - we ordered up a bunch of them on Sept 23 and that one has been clearly captured in the order history, along with the others we sent.
No other school has communicated that they are missing either of these. In fact, one school (also Common App) sent letters for weeks saying they received her transcript and ACT score and hope to see her application soon.
The school has over 30,000 students, so perhaps volume is a factor, particularly this last week before the EA deadline? Any experiences or thoughts? Thanks in advance.
^^^ Yes, of course, thank you. She did submit an inquiry online through that school’s portal.
What I was mostly curious about, and didn’t articulate explicitly, is whether this and other large schools characteristically have tech glitches during the last week before a popular deadline due to high volume of server activity.
Because D also reports, although I haven’t looked myself, that several of her online check-ins for her application status at the 8 schools she applied to have resulted in system error messages.
I applied to several large schools last year (Umass, McGill, UC Berkeley, UCSD, and Northeastern, to be specific) and none of them had tech glitches, but mistakes do happen.
Not necessarily a glitch, but things do get lost. More likely there is lag time in connecting D’s documents to her application. We had this happen more than once. Just notify the school that you have confirmation of receipt by them of the documents and ask is they would like you to resend. It’s likely that this notification went out automatically to all the incomplete applications while barrels of mail are still waiting to be opened and processed. (Left hand/right hand problem).
It happened to us at a medium-small school and it bumped my D out of the EA round into the RD round. Part of the problem was the school did not pick up their docs every day–they “picked them up” once a week. So if it wasn’t there when they did the pick up, it took a whole week to get it and then even more time to file it.
Fordham also kept sending us missing document emails (I mean several of them) and I had the counsellor resend everything and then of course a few weeks later, when I checked her account, there were like 3 versions of everything that had been late. Three of the same transcript, three of the same rec letter, etc. This office in particular seemed to run behind and not know it.
I have determined that submitting emails through the portal is not an efficient way to get info–can take several days. The benefit, of course, is that you have a response in writing. I finally decided I would just call if there were a problem. Some schools have an online chat where they can pull your info and verify docs. I would definitely also call.
She says she has received an e-mail response saying her application is complete. Since the documents got there a month in advance of the application, I think it’s as @N’s mom stated, a lag time in connecting all items to her application. Thanks for the inputs!