If you’re a student applying to colleges as a transfer right now, you may have noticed some significant glitches on The Common Application site for transfers. Some years ago, Common App. decided to create a separate application just for transfer applicants since some of the questions on the Common App. for students applying to colleges out of high school weren’t as pertinent to students who were already in college. We have no issue with Common App. offering a separate application for transfer applicants. In fact, we think it was a good idea. But we do take issue with the fact that the transfer application appears as though it was designed in the early aughts by a high schooler who just learned how to code.

We don’t even know where to begin addressing all of the glitches on Common App.’s transfer site. Should we start with the fact that when you’re in a school-specific supplement, you can’t see the rest of the questions on the page until you move your curser down (and it’s not like there’s a scroll bar!). Or what about how hours per week for certain activities on the activity page sometimes magically appear only to then disappear just as soon as you see them? Or how about the most annoying glitch of all — the fact that the maximum word and character counts for essays are entirely inaccurate? As an example, if one inserts a 500-word essay, on the Common App. for high school students, it will indicate the essay is indeed 500 words. Yet on the transfer site, that very same essay might be 520 words.

We hereby call on The Common Application to address these glitches at once for transfer applicants. Transfer applicants are already under enough stress navigating the the admissions process. They don’t need Common App. to add on mores stress because of their faulty site. Common App., please fix these glitches at once and we strongly encourage you to hire a real computer programmer to redesign the transfer application for next year so no student should ever have to deal with these stressful glitches again.