<p>Teacher recommendation part from CommonApp and Naviance is horrible! I think one counselor said “first come and first serve” probably works this way: any teacher who submits the 1st letter to the Naviance will get assigned to all the schools in CommonApp which requires 1st letter. The 2nd teacher will fill in the 2nd letter spot for ALL schools. I don’t think teacher can even specify which schools to send. In my daughter’s case, she emailed teacher a list of schools to send, but that teacher submitted to all schools. I don’t think teacher did anything wrong, it was Naviance system’s problem! The issue is: some students asked 3 teachers and 2 of them are humanity teacher, one is math/science teacher. If two humanity teachers submit first, those two teachers will fill out all schools which need 2 letters, the science teacher submits later, he can’t submit anymore to those schools which only allow 2 letters. This is so stupid system design! As a software engineer myself, I can’t imagine who would design this lousy system!</p>
<p>Does the unassign function really not work? God I’m screwed. Please post if any solutions are found to this problem. The only slightly useful thing that I found was: say if at the time when your teacher sent the rec, you had Colleges A, B, and C on your list. If you add College D to your list after your teacher sent that rec, then his/her rec does not seem to be assigned for College D, only for A, B, and C. I know, not very useful, but it’s something I guess</p>
<p>I now have an explanation but no solution. The problem is Naviance. Once Submit is hit by the teacher and Naviance and Common App are synched up, it is too late. Naviance locks up everything even though the college has not downloaded anything. It gets worse. Once two teachers have submitted and the college has a max of two, you are out of luck. There is no going back at all. Naviance is not working on a solution. They do not think it is a problem, even though they never told GCs about it. Only GCs and schools can force Naviance to change this. Only other way is for colleges to relax their max requirement by one so that all recommendations get uploaded and then they can get a separate email from us about which ones we wanted to submit.</p>
<p>Advice to others whose teachers have not submitted recommendations yet, ask your GC to turn off automatic synching with Common App. They should turn it on only after confirming everything with teachers about college assigments.</p>
<p>Frustrated that a stupid system issue can mess up a college up.</p>
<p>Isn’t it possible for the third teacher (when there are limits, as I am understanding this) to print out a recommendation on a old-fashioned piece of paper, and send it off to the schools via old-fashioned mail? Can’t hurt. I presume some schools at least keep actual folders for students’ papers, so it just goes in the folder. </p>
<p>This could work for some of the other glitches as well.</p>
<p>TRUE THAT–any software engineer, or just plain-old vanilla users, could point out things on the new Common App which are just really…stupid. Very poor design.</p>