The Choice: Restraint on Listing Activities

As some high school seniors have already discovered, this year’s Common Application has up to a dozen spaces available for applicants to list their activities outside the classroom, including time spent working. For some go-getters, that’s probably not enough space — but for many others, it may be too much.

Which raises an obvious question: should an applicant stretch to fill those 12 lines?

The answer, say deans of admissions and the creators of the application itself, is a resounding “No.”

In my regular column for The Times’s Education Life supplement, which will be published this weekend, I have attempted to disentangle the section of the Common Application devoted to extracurricular activities. It includes a request to applicants that they “briefly elaborate on one” activity or work experience in four lines or less — a question that can be as important, if not more so, than the list itself.

Here’s how Monica C. Inzer, the dean of admissions at Hamilton College in New York and a member of the Common Application board, put it:

We’d rather see depth than a longer list. I think students think we want well-rounded kids. We do. But we really want a well-rounded class. That could be lots of people who have individual strengths. Distinction in one area is good, and better than doing a lot of little things.

You can read a preview of the full article here. Meanwhile, this is probably as good an occasion as any to start a comment thread on the subject of extracurricular activities. Please use the box below to let us know your thoughts.

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The Choice: What's Gained, and Lost, In an Era of Virtual College Searches and Applications

Reflections on a busy month on the admissions calendar, by Sue Biemeret, counselor at Adlai E. Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Ill.

How did technology become both my new BFF and my arch-enemy? I find myself lusting for any iGadget that I can afford, wouldn’t think of going on vacation without my Kindle, and tell students how lucky they are to be able to Google their college searches. Life is good and clean and quick and secure when it’s online.

But then I find myself longing for the feel of paper, miss the smell of musty college catalogs on my bookshelf and love reading college essays that are printed out.

Students send their applications to the new black hole of admissions – the Common Application Web site – and their transcripts zip off electronically at the press of a button (and the charge of a credit card). They may never speak to anyone along the way. Life is bad and messy and cumbersome and scary when it’s online.

The fact is, most students won’t apply to college today without going online. And that’s a good thing. I’m old enough to remember when they had to write away to get a college catalog to conduct their research. Weeks after sending that request, they’d get back a 275-page tome, where they could read all about a school’s mission, its goals, its many policies and procedures, and a detailed listing of every single course offered.

Students had to locate paper copies of their applications, complete them by neatly printing or typing — how many students today have ever even seen a typewriter, much less use one? — and then hope that the mailman would deliver them neatly and on time.

Today’s students can conduct their entire college search online. It’s wonderful! You can learn about internship opportunities, e-mail a department head to ask about a specific major, download and complete an application, submit your transcript and even learn of your admission decision all online. Students can access their college application account anywhere there’s an Internet connection, making the process portable and convenient. You can carry your entire academic future on a jump drive.

When technology works, it is pure music. However, when it doesn’t work, it is pure chaos.

What do you do when the “Details and Accomplishments” section of your Activities page on the Common App disappears? Or when your Docufide transcript doesn’t show up in your electronic file at Nirvana U? Whom do you call?

No one. You can’t talk to anyone about your online application. You can e-mail the support center and they’ll get back to you within 24 hours (except when they’re “experiencing an atypically high volume”) and then they can’t get back to you for several days. Like I said, it’s “The Sound of Music” when technology works, but it’s “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” when it doesn’t.

On the one hand, all this technology has rewritten my job description. I have had to learn every detail about electronic applications (my online student alter-ego is an amazingly talented young woman, Leigh D. Gaga, who’s just about done with her Common Application) and I’ve had to learn all about pdf versus html transcripts.

But on the other hand, all this technology has reinforced and renewed my job description. Simply stated, my job is to help students make the best college choice they can. If my kids are going to succeed, I need to be the human element in this apply.com universe.

All I ask is that you be patient with me; I still snail mail my thank you notes.

To comment on this essay, please use the box below.

Ms. Biemeret is a post-secondary counselor at Adlai E. Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Ill., and executive director of The Academy for College Admission Counseling, a nonprofit organization that provides graduate-level education on college counseling for counselors.

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The Choice: Application Inflation, and Extra Time on the SAT and ACT for Students with Disabilities

The latest edition of Education Life, The Times’s quarterly supplement, will be published this weekend and, as always, there is lots of “news you can use” for college applicants and their families.

In an article published in collaboration with The Chronicle of Higher Education, Eric Hoover tackles the subject of “Application Inflation” — the efforts by highly-selective colleges to recruit record-breaking numbers of applicants every year, only to reject the vast majority of them.

“Although the tension between mission and marketing has long defined admissions,” Mr. Hoover writes, “many believe the balance has tilted too far toward the latter.” You can read the full article here.

Separately, Abigail Sullivan Moore passes along the latest advice on the testing accommodations for students with learning disabilities and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. “Perseverance pays,” she writes, in an article well worth examining in full.

If you’ve got comments on either of these subjects, you can post them here, using the box below.

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