Common Application

The Common Application (informally known as the Common App) is an undergraduate college admission application that applicants may use to apply to any of 488 member colleges and universities in the United States and various other countries. It is managed by the staff of a not-for-profit membership association (The Common Application, Inc.) and governed by a 13-member volunteer Board of Directors drawn from the ranks of college admission deans and secondary school college guidance counselors. Its mission is to encourage the use of "holistic admission" a process that includes subjective factors gleaned from essays and recommendations alongside more objective criteria such as class rank and standardized testing.

Member institutions may also require a "Common App Supplement," and ask additional questions, with only two restrictions: 1) supplement questions may not re-ask questions already asked on the Common Application (except identifying information like name, address, date of birth, etc.), and 2) supplement questions may not ask questions that violate the NACAC Statement of Principles and Good Practice (such as "please rank order your college choices.").

Read more about Common Application:  The Online Application System, Membership

Famous quotes containing the words common and/or application:

    Repentance keeps my heart impure;
    But what am I that dare
    Fancy that I can
    Better conduct myself or have more
    Sense than a common man?
    William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)

    “Five o’clock tea” is a phrase our “rude forefathers,” even of the last generation, would scarcely have understood, so completely is it a thing of to-day; and yet, so rapid is the March of the Mind, it has already risen into a national institution, and rivals, in its universal application to all ranks and ages, and as a specific for “all the ills that flesh is heir to,” the glorious Magna Charta.
    Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)