Anyone else filling out the Coalition App?

[Innisfree]

It's not quite like the Common App, and I'm finding the Help feature far less helpful. We don't seem to have many old threads on it, either.

So, FYI: if you may need to deal with this in the future, allow plenty of lead time.

[UmmIbrahim]

Lol, we used Coalition for a bunch of schools. At first I thought it was kind of silly. "What do you mean I have to completely finish the profile to be able to add any schools?!" It felt almost like a game "do this to unlock this." Over time, however, I learned to like it pretty well. Their text boxes were less weird with pasting text and we didn't have to do anything crazy to get em-dashes to show up properly (finally figured out to type a double hyphen in Common App to get an em-dash in the generated PDF), or worry about double hard returns causing paragraphs to look weird.

When we wanted to get a list of all of the supplemental essays for certain schools, we also would put placeholder text in the boxes for essays on earlier pages to be able to advance to subsequent essays (the "next" button is greyed out unless you fill in something for all required fields on any given page). That was mildly annoying, but in the end I liked their PDF formatting better. Not to mention you get a little more space in the activities section to describe extracurriculars!

[Innisfree]

Yeah, I think my part as counselor is done now, and I survived, lol. It's a somewhat different set of documents from the common app: no obvious place to put course descriptions, so I did what was suggested in one of the old threads here and appended them to the transcript. Hope that works for the colleges getting this application..

Dd was frustrated because she had to list each class in each year individually, even though we were uploading the transcript (unless she misunderstood something...). Then, having listed each class, they also wanted her to list each class which had been done at a college for dual enrollment, which was half of them, all over again. It seemed over the top.

Once I figured it out, my part wasn't too painful. But I missed all the helpful Common App threads here, where I could see what had worked for others in the past. Those are so reassuring.

[Penelope]

We used it this year but are thankfully done with all applications. 

I really didn’t think it was too bad; most everything was fairly user-friendly once I figured out what to do. I haven’t used the Common App, though. We didn’t utilize the feature of sending College Board scores through Coalition, but did those separately, just in case, since I think that was new.

One thing I am still not sure that I did the best way is the school profile. Apparently, schools only see that if they also request a counselor letter or counselor report; the profile is connected to that. And not all of our schools wanted that, so they did not all get a school profile. It did not seem to hurt the applications, though. I think a lot of schools that use these apps submit their guidance counselor info and transcripts through a different electronic service, so maybe that is why the Coalition is still clunky and has these all separate and only allows one attachment for the transcript. If I had a do over, I would attach the school profile to the transcript and not only the course descriptions. 

Edited January 16, 2020 by Penelope

[Innisfree]

That's a good thought about the school profile; I need to see if dd's school wants the counselor letter. I'm still figuring this all out, and wasn't thinking that everything I put on the application might not be looked at by the school.

Another thing that I thought people might want to know is that for the counselor letter, they specifically ask for a range of 300 to 600 words. I had to completely rework the letter I had used for the Common App.

[Penelope]

Mine was slightly over that and I didn’t worry about it.  I considered it a suggestion.