Anyone have experience with School Links? My daughter’s school uses it, and it seems to add extra steps to everything, when the Common App alone would be so much easier. She figured out how to invite teachers to submit recommendations, which have been uploaded to the Common App (via School Links) for her Early Decision school. All good there. We assumed that once a recommendation entered the Common App for one school, it would appear in a drop-down that she could assign to all her other schools’ apps. But this is not the case. Do kids seriously need to request the rec again from scratch for each individual school’s app through School Links? Or are we missing something? If ED doesn’t work out she has ten schools to apply to, which will get annoying for teachers if they have to send a rec from scratch each time. Any insight is appreciated!
Are the recommenders saved in School Links? Can she assign them to the colleges on her list through School Links? If the school is managing the process through software integrated with the Common App (Scoir, Naviance, School Links), she shouldn’t have to assign recs directly on the Common App platform.
Yes, she assigns–actually, invites–a teacher to an individual college app through School Links. But then that rec doesn’t exist in School Links or the Common App to assign to a different school. From what we can tell, she has to re-invite each teacher from scratch to each new college, which seems like a lot to ask of teachers when kids apply to 10+ schools.
Has she talked with the guidance office at her school? How about classmates who are also using the tool?
It’s hard to believe it’s set up in a way that would require new requests every time a student applies to any of their colleges. The faculty would revolt.
She’s sort of the guinea pig–first person using it bc applying early at a small school, first year school is using it. She can make an appointment next week but had a chunk of time allotted to make a lot of progress this weekend.
So when she’s on the page for one of her colleges in School Links and clicks on “add recommender,” she doesn’t get the pulldown menu that allows her to select a stored recommender?
Exactly–no she doesn’t. It asks her to invite them as if it starting from scratch. She went through each step of it, assuming at some point it would remember that that teacher exists in the system, but it treats it as a new request.
That sounds like a configuration glitch.
Hope so! School Links is not user friendly 
There are user guides on line. Most of the functionality mirrors that of Scoir and Naviance. I think your school’s implementation probably needed a little UAT before it went live.
Yes you need to assign recommenders for each school. I assume the reason is some people might want to vary recommender by school, especially since some schools want one and others want two. It will literally take 5 minutes to assign a recommender for all her schools.
No that’s not the problem. They have to be re-invited and accept again for each individual school–four teachers, ten schools.
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