While the Admissions Office has not yet experienced any challenges with downloading or processing applications, dean of admissions and financial aid Maria Laskaris said the department has received calls from concerned students, counselors and parents, especially those from schools that use Naviance, a web-based software that helps submit college application forms.
Some student-athletes, who face tight deadlines, were worried about submitting their application materials on time.
"Their counselors were especially concerned about the challenges of submitting through the Common Application," Laskaris said. We've heard from students and parents as well, who are having trouble creating their accounts."
The Common App went completely paperless for the first time on Aug. 1 and began having technical problems earlier this fall, delaying the over 1 million students and 517 higher education institutions that use the application. High school senior and early decision applicant Jordan Yavari of Wayne, Ill., initially heard about the glitches from a friend's father and followed his advice to submit her application as soon as possible. She did not experience any problems submitting it but ran into trouble when she tried to pay her application fee.
"It didn't take me to the signature page immediately," Yavari said. "I went through the process again, wasn't asked to pay again, and then was taken directly to the signature page."
Yavari felt comfortable knowing she submitted her application with plenty of time before the original deadline, but said she remains concerned that Dartmouth will not being able to download her application.
This is the third time in three years that the College has had to postpone its early decision deadline. Last year, after Hurricane Sandy hit mid-Atlantic and southern New England states, the Admissions Office told early decision applicants to contact them if they could not submit applications by Nov. 5.
The previous year, the College pushed the deadline back to Nov. 7 after a snowstorm left 2.2 million homes on the East Coast without power.
"It's not something we necessarily expect will happen every year, but if students and schools are unable to access the system for whatever reason, we have a little bit of flexibility built into our calendar where we can accommodate that," Laskaris said. "We've never really had to go more than a week in order to allow students and their schools to submit materials."
In the last five years, between 35 and 41 percent of students are accepted through early decision, according to the Dartmouth Fact Book. Since 2007, the College has used a completely paperless, online application which can be affected by technical problems.
"There is really no other way if the system is not functioning properly," Laskaris said. "We don't have paper applications that students can easily get their hands on and mail in."
She said that she does not think the early decision deadline postponement will delay early decision admission notifications from their normal mid-December date.
"We very much will do everything we can to be as timely as we typically are, just knowing that students who are not offered admission want to turn around and work on applications to other institutions," Laskaris said. "We made this decision in order to give everyone just a little bit of breathing room. This process, for students anyway, has enough stress built into it."
Laskaris, who declined to give the number of early decision applicants received so far, said it is too soon to predict how they will compare with past years, given the technical difficulties currently surrounding the Common App. The Admissions Office anticipates that all issues will be resolved before the Jan. 1 regular decision application deadline.
Columbia University, Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, Duke University, Barnard College and Tufts University have all pushed their early admissions deadlines back to Nov. 8, while other Ivy League institutions have kept their Nov. 1 deadlines.
The Admissions Office may offer alternate application services, such as the Universal College Application used by Harvard University and Princeton University, to students in the future.
"It's too soon to know exactly what we'll do, but we are certainly in conversations about whether we maintain an exclusive contract with the CA or we think about having two different application options," Laskaris said. Last Thursday, the Common App issued a formal apology on its website, saying it had fixed two of their most complex issues surrounding payments and Chrome browser compatibility.
