We seniors have a lot on our minds -- the pandemic, economic collapse, the BLM movement, an election, online learning, and of course, college applications. External stress impacts our performance in many ways. I, personally, have made careless mistakes on every single math and physics problem since the start of the year. I can no longer add and subtract in my head, and I completely forgot how to use my calculator to graph. But distractions have started to affect me beyond classwork. As I began to fill out the basic information sections of my Common App, I noticed innumerable opportunities to contradict myself, accidentally click the wrong dropdown menu options, leave questions blank, or fill out questions with the incorrect information. Along the way, I made many of these mistakes, and I knew the best way to make art out of my pain would be to write a Thursday Detention article. So, for your amusement, here are the lucky number 13 most egregious errors this year’s seniors have made on their Common Applications:
- Provided the IKEA customer service number instead of their phone number (an autofill mistake)
- Spelled name of college wrong throughout the whole application
- Completely forgot to report AP scores
- Exchanged mother’s name for the student’s name so that it looked like the student had attended law school
- Uploaded a screenshot of a meme instead of first quarter grades (quickly realized mistake and corrected it, don’t worry college counselors!)
- Off by 30 when listing number of students in our grade
- Forgot to fill out the additional information section even though it was slightly necessary
- Put the wrong school for mom
- Spelled brother’s name wrong
- Somehow pasted one paragraph of a supplement into the application three times
- Removed all words with fewer than three letters from activities section so description would fit and then forgot to fix it
- Talked about location and campus in why this school supplement
- Accidentally put AP English Language and Composition instead of AP English Literature and Composition