October 15th Deadline

Tomorrow is October 15th! That means the first wave of Early Action/Early Decision deadlines is upon us… though for some schools, they’ve extended their timelines. Citing issues with the Common Application, UNC Chapel Hill and Duke University both pushed back their 10/15 deadlines to 10/21 after students were unable to complete their applications.

In a response, the Common Application made a statement regarding the status of the cite over the busy Columbus Day weekend in a post  on a forum sponsored by the National Association of College Admission Counseling.

“The slowness is due to a spike in activity among recommenders, which is having an impact in system performance for all users. The result is a time-out issue, which presents itself to users as an unsuccessful login error. We first observed the issue around 9:00 AM ET. Troubleshooting allowed us to resolve the problem within about 30 minutes. Unfortunately, the issue cropped up again about 30 minutes later and continues to persist.”

For more information, check out this post from The Examiner – it has lots of details. The good news here is that it isn’t only the students being inconvenienced, the schools are too – and are dealing with it in a way to minimize stress on applicants. Hopefully the system will be up and running smoothly soon and until then – try to relax!

Here are two other schools with October 15 deadlines (that haven’t been changed, at least as of yet):

University of Georgia – Early Action – 10/15

University of South Carolina – Early Answer – 10/15

The next big wave of deadlines is November 1 so if that is a target date for any of your schools, get cranking!