@lknomad, I am angry for you! Those teachers really sound like they are falling down on their job as advocates.
The silver lining is the beautiful essay your son ended up writing. I think that has to touch hearts.
Re arts supplement, DS asked his ceramics teacher to write a supplementary letter because the arts end was worth mentioning but not perhaps at arts supplement levelā¦
BTW for those it affects, common app does not play nicely with Google docs in terms of punctuation and some formatting. DSās EA was affected, and thanks to advice from a CC friend, I learned to call the admissions office and they said email with a new .pdf of the essay so he did.
Google Docsā formatting doesnāt hold into a lot of other applications. I like using it to write first drafts for my job because itās easy to access no matter where I am-- but final drafts need to be formatted in Word or some other program, because G-docs turn into word salad when they get sent to anyone in any format other than a link to the document.
How do you have an outsider send a letter? Snailmail?
Well, first apps went in yesterday. Just a couple, one lottery and one a more or less match (I hope). Iām hoping the teacher recs get in this week without any problems. DD wll get one more early app in this week before the November 1 deadline, and then turn to the dozen or so regular decision apps still to be done. Truly, this is an insane, expensive, anxiety-promoting exercise. I donāt post much here, but do drop in from time to time. Thank you to all of you in this virtual community. May the admissions gods smile on our children. One does have to wonder how long this model will be sustainable: do you think our childrenās children will still be using a Common App and colleges will cost $100K a year in 25 to 30 years? Hard to imagineā¦
DD submitted her first out of 3 EA applications last night. We both were reading application materials and essays and both found different errors. Luckily before she submitted.
@drmom123, on the CA (at least for non-Naviance schools, which is our situation), there is an option for recommenders to choose the offline form. In that case, you have to print out the form and give it to the person (who is listed as a recommender and assigned to a school), who does snail mail it (or I suppose they could scan and e mail it) to the admissions office directly. My daughter has one person who prefers to do that so he can individualize his letters.
I ordered my cap and gown today and got my tassel. It was very strange and surprisingly emotional. I guess when you have something tangible, it all feels real.
How do you check the status of your order from the College Board? I was looking at my organizer under SAT, but could not find.
Never mind. Found it.
@readingclaygirl That must be very exciting and a bit scary too (I would imagine). In our district our students do not get their caps, gowns, etc until right before graduation. I suspect it is because most will lose them in the interim.
On a separate note, my D is so surprised that she is one of a very very select few that are actually submitting EA applications. She mentioned tonight that many of her peers have not even thought about what they want to write their CA essay on (and I suspect they do not realize that they may have supplemental questions to answer after the CA essay). That seems very strange to her because she will probably have all her applications (EA and RD) submitted long before their actual deadlines. It would be too stressful for her to wait until the bitter end to complete something so important. Are we too tightly wrapped or are they too loosely wrapped? I wonderā¦?
@Ballerina2016 Could you please let me know how to find the status of your SAT order? I canāt find it anywhere on their website.
@lonetreegrad Log on to the āscoresā page of the SAT. You should see the entirety of your testing history with the SAT here. In the section where all your scores are shown, thereās something right at the top of that. Itās labeled āSee sent scoresā. Click on that, and youāll be able to see the status of your score reports. Hope this helps.
@Ballerina2016 Found it. Thank you. 
Wow! D ordered her scores on October 22nd and it still says order pending! They sure are taking their time to send these!
@lvmjac1 My S16 is not surprised heās one of the few submitting EA apps. He knows itās what all the CC families do. Our flagship requires apps to be submitted by Nov 1 for merit scholarship consideration so most of his friends are likely to at least do that one. The more he does now the more time heāll have in November for NaNoWriMo.
Same here. Paid for rush delivery to one school. Still pending.
D learned today that she has submitted the most applications so far for her senior class (4 with 2 more this week) and has the only acceptance. But itās not a matter of tightly wound or loosely wound. MOST kids out there arenāt in full application mode, not even kids in ācollege-boundā classes. Most of Dās friends no matter the HS, arenāt applying to a dozen colleges, taking both ACT and SAT multiple times, etc. Some donāt even have a college list yet. Most will go on to one of the several local colleges or CC. Thatās NORMAL. Even the vals and sals around here go in-state if not local.
The kids of CC parents are a unique group. Theyāre driven, high-achieving, highly involved in school and out-of-school ECās, maybe sports and possibly a job. They live and breathe leadership and a drive to ādo somethingā. But they arenāt typical. Neither are we parents for helping them manage it all. Itās all the other kids and their families who are wound just about right, I think.
Few weeks ago, DD told me that there would be a meeting with a recruiter from UPenn at her out-of-school writing program. UPenn is famous for recruiting creative writing applicants like athletes and it is a good chance to be recruited as a creative writing student. I teased her whether she was going to a meeting and she bluntly said, āno.ā My DD does not like UPenn and I never suggested the school when she shaped the college list. When she showed her list to GC, GC asked her whether she wanted to add UPenn because of creative writer recruit at Penn but my DD clearly said no.
It started a couple of years ago. DD was reading several writings which won one of the most prestigious writing awards (probably the most prestigious) for teens. She found one of the writing was plagiarized. She asked me what to do and I told her to notify the foundation which gave the awards one of the awarded piece was plagiarized. So she notified the plagiarized work to the foundation and UPenn. She thought the student was recruited because of the prize, otherwise he could not get admission. (I am not sure that part, because he managed his own literacy magazine as a high school student and won some other awards, anyway. I learned that his GPA was relatively low for UPenn. He left several chance thread here in cc. )
Few weeks later, she found his awards was revoked and he removed the award from his resume. But at school, nothing happened. More worse, she thought he involved more to the program and worked as an invaluable advocate to recruit creative writers to the school.
In the mean time, several students in her writing program were given a chance to submit articles about education to Newsweek. DD wrote an article about the plagiarism case arguing that extensive competitions for college lead students to do unethical behavior. I liked the idea but she wanted to put the student name in her article. I said if I was an editor, I would reject the article or ask the name anonymous because he was still young and not ready to be blamed from outside. But she insisted to put his name and I said itās up to her.
Wellā¦ she received a rejection letter from an editor a couple of weeks later, saying exactly the same words I said. DDās article was not published. I suspect DDās writing was not good enough to publish and saying heās too young to be named was a good excuse to reject DDās article.
She strictly follows rules and hates other kids do cheating or similar. If homework is marked as no help or online search, she never asks any help nor goes online to find some help. So it is hard to swallow for her. I donāt know exactly why the school is so protective to the student. Anyway, I hope they have good reason to protect the student and the decision was made after full consideration of the incident.
Most of my sonās friends do not have any idea where they want to go to college. They have not visited campuses and have not applied. At first I thought that perhaps they did not want to tell him in case they did not get admitted. However, now I am convinced that they simply do not have any idea. One of his friends planned to ride with my son to a local campus. He said if he liked it then he would apply. He ended up not going because my son was invited to a meeting that day on campus. Anyway, he could have toured that campus a long time ago. It is only 30 minutes from our area. I can understand that he has not had an opportunity to travel to other parts of the state. Anyway, my sonās friends are at least A/ B+ students so this surprised me. Maybe they plan to apply regular decision early next year.