Why I Love the Common App, an article by Muhammad Raza

 Why I Love the Common App

by Muhammad Raza

One of the most staple, difficult, and perhaps dreaded features of every student's college application process is the Common App. The Common App is an online college application portal that allows you to apply to multiple colleges at once using the same information, and lets you organize your top choices in one place. It is also used by many colleges as the primary way of receiving applications, illustrating its value for both students and the colleges they want to attend. Although many detest the application portal, with its blue and white color palette and seemingly infinite amount of categories and information to fill out, I believe that it is one of the greatest assets for ambitious students with dreams of attending prestigious institutions. 

The Common App is useful to the college application process because it simplifies everything for students. Imagine having to repeatedly fill out information about grades, standardized tests, and extra-curricular activities for 10 different schools, each with its own requirements for how to do so. The Common App not only provides students with a manageable way to provide this information but also standardizes these steps for colleges. 

Another reason why the Common App is great is that it provides college-specific information and supplemental essays. For college-specific information, the Common App separates sections in the portal for each of the colleges that you are applying to, highlighting all the different types of information and letting you see how each college differs from the others. Furthermore, supplemental essays are simple to write on the Common App as they are usually under either the “Writing” or “Academic” category for each college, which saves you the trouble of having to go find supplemental prompts and writing them on your own. 

The last reason why the Common App is beneficial, in my opinion, is that it provides a great way to compare your application with other students. Without a standardized means of filling out information, if you had a general question, you would have to ask someone applying for the same college and the same program rather than just asking any student who is applying through the Common App. This uniformity directly benefits students, counselors, and college advisors by ensuring that everyone is answering the same questions and can properly express their proficiency and uniqueness. 

As a whole, while the Common App may seem like an unnecessarily laborious and inefficient process to apply to college, students should recognize the benefit it provides to them and how their applications would be extremely different without it. The Common App not only ensures uniformity and fairness for all of its students, but also shows how standardization, even in other sectors, is beneficial as a whole.