Will using the SSAT app lower my chances of admission?

<p>Hello, everyone. I am an applicant for the 2012-2013 school year, and I have been working on my applications and it is getting VERY time consuming. I was planning on doing the individual application for every school, since I'm only applying to 5 schools (Deerfield, Lawrenceville, St George's, Blair and Hill) but lately it's been so hard to stay organized and get it all done, especially with my outrageously busy schedule. Plus, I feel bad giving my teachers 5 different recommendations to fill out. I was considering doing all applications with the SSAT application (except for Deerfield, which doesn't accept that one) because I need to use that for Lawrenceville anyways. Will this affect my chances? It seems as though it might because it's really easy to just add another school to the list without really wanting to go there. However, I am very serious about all of these schools, especially after the hours and hours of research I've put in. Does anyone have opinions? Thanks so much!</p>

<p>We used it for 5 schools last year; results: 4 acceptances, 1 WL. I don’t think it adversely affects your chances at all.</p>

<p>Okay, thank you! That makes me feel better.</p>

<p>I think there’s a common recommendation on TABS.com and you can use that for every school. Just have your teacher fill it out and photocopy it. Most of the recommendations are similar anyways…</p>

<p>first and foremost, not all schools accept the SSAT app or the TABS app. In my experience, I believe most NJ and Connecticut schools do, but many Massachusetts and New Hampshire schools so not. Some schools may prefer that you use their applications, but they pretty much receive the same information in most applications. The only difference might be essays, and even a lot of those overlap. So even if you have to fill out more than one application you can probably copy and paste a lot of the information anyway.</p>

<p>In my experience, most schools will accept a common form for teacher recommendations. However, my child’s teachers all preferred to write individual recommendations for each school applied to, even thought we told them we were fine with using the same one for each.</p>

<p>Thanks for the input, everyone. I think what I’m going to do is do the SSAT application for Lawrenceville and the Hill School (since I’ve started all of the individual applications except for Hill) and then do the individual apps for SG, Blair and Deerfield.</p>

<p>No school that accepts the TABS application is going to hold it against you that you use it. They wouldn’t say they accept it if it wasn’t acceptable to them!</p>