How accurate must an application be?

[Janeway]

The way things are worded has made it difficult to actually be accurate. For example, it asks about activities a person was in, how many weeks a year, and how many hours. Okay..but..what if the child was in it way more hours in the summer than the school year? Or more hours some times of the year than others? I just put down an average. Another place, it asks about volunteer work but insisted that an end date be put. So I put graduation month and year as the date. Under the volunteer section, I had to make a complete guess on the hours done. And I am thinking the volunteer hours and activity hours might be the same. As in, son took karate at a place where he also volunteer taught. He would work more than full time during the summer and then 20 hrs a week during the school year, easily.  I had him put down 20 hrs a week.  I also told him to put down 50 weeks a year, but I am really unsure how many weeks it was. Then at the end, it says they can check the application for accuracy and I get worried..what if I get the number of weeks wrong or the number of hours?

[EKS]

My son is estimating the same way your son is.  And my 23yo did the same thing when he applied to college.

I absolutely can't stand the way these applications assume that they know how things are and then force you into their version of reality.  They could easily have a comment box where you explain your time commitment to each activity.  But instead it is more important to them to be able to compare applicants in a standardized way (and probably sort them by total time commitment or some such thing, and a bunch of other ways besides).  

Edited August 25, 2019 by EKS

[Frances]

I think this is what most people do, use averages and answer to the best of their ability. During high school, I had my son record all of his activity and volunteer hours in his planner every week, just so it would be easier to do applications when the time came. My son also did karate and taught hundreds of classes without pay. Personally, I didn’t think of that as volunteering, so much as evidence of leadership in the activity. But maybe it was because his dojo was a for profit business, even though the parent organization was a non-profit, that I never thought of it as volunteering. YMMV.

Edited August 27, 2019 by Frances

[easypeasy]

Oh, I hate that and had forgotten that it was set up that way (we still haven't started this process yet!!).

With dd1, we just averaged it out and plugged stuff in "close enough." For the "big" volunteer activities, dd1 was able to explain more about it through some additional essays.

In our experience, they never cared about the "exactness" of it one whit. So, for dd2 and ds, we're ust plugging in numbers and not worrying about it.

[Sebastian (a lady)]

I think averages are fine.

Some applications have a box for additional information. Your kid could describe some activities as summer and others as full year.  You could explain it in a counselor letter. Or you could just let it stand.

I think it raises eyebrows if the numbers don't make sense, such as if the hours add up to more than the free hours in a week.