We understand that the application season can be a busy time for students and counsellors. This can also be a very busy time for colleges and universities receiving hundreds of applications and supporting documents for their institution. Thus, on occasion, students may receive communication from their applying institutions to query some of the documentation in support of their application. We've listed some common scenarios when this may occur that may help.
Emails about missing documents
In some cases, universities will contact students to say that documents haven't been received, this is commonly an auto-generated email that has been sent before the university's own system has processed all the documents received.
For documents sent via Parchment:
We recommend contacting the university to double-check that the document is indeed missing. Advisors can navigate to the student's Document Sending page to locate the document's Parchment ID which you can provide to the university's admissions team to help them locate the document. Please also refer to this article: Tracking Documents sent through Parchment.
On the Advisor's Document Sending page
For documents sent via Common App
Please first check with students to make sure they have already submitted their applications on Common App. Submitted documents will be held within Common App and only released to the university after the student submits their application for each institution.
On BridgeU, if the documents are showing a Submitted status with a date/time stamp but the university hasn't downloaded them, please contact the university to make them aware that the documents are available for them to download from their own Common App member account.
If the status is showing downloaded on BridgeU, it may be that the university hasn't updated the document status on their own application portal after downloading. Please let the university know that Common App shows the documents have been downloaded by them and request to update the status on their own application portal to reflect this.
Unable to match submitted documents to the applying student's application
On occasion, universities are unable to match the documents they've received with the student's application because the student is using a different name on their documents to that on their application.
If the document is marked as delivered on BridgeU but the university is unable to find it, please ensure that it was sent with the same name as appears on the student's application. It is advised to also ensure the name of the student on BridgeU is the same as appears on the student's application.
If not, inform the university of the difference and they should be able to track down the document. You can also provide a Parchment ID or Common App submission timestamps to help them locate the documents. In some cases, though, you may need to resend it with the corrected name.