Troubleshooting & FAQs

Advisor's Document Sending page

On the Document Sending page, you can use the filters to view students who have paired/ not paired their Common App account as well as students who have not answered FERPA or, have waived/not waived FERPA. Alternatively, when viewing an individual student account on the Document Sending page, these details are indicated at the top.

If you are seeing the below screen, there are 2 possibilities for this. 

1. The student hasn't paired with Common App.

2. The student has paired with Common App but hasn't added any applications on Common App yet.

It’s important for us to assess the paired Common App ID (CAID) attached to the student’s BridgeU account. Please contact our support team via Live Chat or by emailing hi@bridge-u.com and include the below information for our reference so we can review this further for you:

• The Common App ID the student wishes to unpair
• Has the student already submitted applications on this Common App ID?
• The reason the student wishes to unpair their Common App ID in place of a different one
• Has the student already invited teacher and counselor recommenders on their new Common App ID account?

It's possible that the student hasn't successfully paired their Common App account with their BridgeU account. To address this, please refer them to this article Pairing your BridgeU & Common App accounts - for Students  for instructions on how to pair their accounts. School details will be automatically added to the student’s Common App account during the pairing process.

If the student has paired their accounts successfully and their CAID in BridgeU matches the CAID on their Common App account, then they may need to check that they have the correct school details and school CEEB code listed in their Common App account. To do this, please ask the student to log into their Common App account go to the Common App tab > Education. If the school information is incorrect and/or the CEEB code is missing, please ask them to update this in their Common App account to ensure the integration with BridgeU works correctly.

If you need further assistance in resolving this matter, please reach out to us through Live Chat or by emailing hi@bridge-u.com

If students invite counselors and/or teachers through their Common App account directly, it can prevent the document-sending capabilities within BridgeU. It is important to remind students to only invite recommenders via BridgeU directly after they have paired their accounts. If a student has already invited a teacher and/or counselor recommender via Common App, the student can manually remove recommenders from their Common App account. To do so, students should log into their Common App account, go to My Colleges Select any university or college in their list > Recommenders and FERPA > Manage Recommenders and select the delete (trash can) icon next to the recommenders to remove them. Further information on this can also be found in this article (point 3). If the removal is no longer available for the student to self-serve, please reach out to us on Live Chat or by emailing hi@bridge-u.com  to provide the student’s name, CAID and recommender information so we can review this further for you.

If you keep getting errors when filling out a Common App form, please check for any incomplete questions. To find out which questions are incomplete, click Save at the top of the form and you will see error messages above fields that require your attention.

If the student's form has a red-lined bubble which is filled in white, it means that the form is incomplete.It will be filled with light red when it is complete and ready to be sent. Example:

There are a couple reasons that may cause this:

1. Have you already submitted the School Final Report? If you have then all forms are now locked and no further documents can be submitted for the student as per Common App's policy:
"The Final Report shouldn't be submitted until the applicant has accepted admission at the school of their choice. Once you submit the Final Report, all other school forms will be locked and you will no longer be able to access or submit them."

The School Final Report is a global form which can be unsubmitted as long as no university has downloaded it yet. Please see this article for more information Unsubmitting Common App forms if not yet downloaded by a University. If you are able to unsubmit the School Final Report, please go ahead to unsubmit this so that you can continue to send documents. If the unsubmit button is not available this means that at least one university has downloaded the form and no further documents can be sent. In this instance we recommend that you contact the university's admissions office to enquire about alternative direct document sending options such as email or post. 

2. Does the student have the correct school details listed in their Common App account? Please ask the student to check their Common App account > Education section to ensure their school details, including the school's CEEB code are correctly listed. If this information is not correct or is missing, it can prevent document sending via BridgeU.

Check the university website to understand how the university accepts documents e.g. direct to them. Most likely we do not support it however, if you have information that they do accept documents through Common App and/or Parchment, please send the information to us and we will look into this.

Schools are able to indicate up to 4 transcript documents on the School Report.  You can upload up to 4 documents as 'initial transcripts'. This could include transcripts from the student's previous school(s). Alternatively, you could combine documents to send as a single PDF but please note that Common App has a file size limit of 2MB per document.

Remember, the number indicated on the School Report must match the number of initial transcript documents uploaded, so if you say '2' and then only upload 1 initial transcript you will receive an error message.

When you click send in BridgeU, it means that the document is sent to Common App but remains in standby mode. The documents will only be officially sent to a university once the student submits their application on Common App.

If a Teacher Recommendation is marked as sent in BridgeU but the student's Common App shows the same recommendation as not started, this is likely because the student has not yet submitted their application on Common App.

When the Teacher Recommendation has been successfully delivered to Common App, it will only be processed and sent to the University once the student submits their application on Common App. Therefore, the discrepancy - if any - in the status between BridgeU and Common App is due to the student's application submission status.

The un-submitting task usually takes a few seconds to complete. Once it's completed, the page should refresh itself. However, if it takes too long, don't worry, just manually refresh the page to see the updated status.

This means that one of the Universities has already downloaded the form. As BridgeU automatically synchronises the data from Common App every 24 hours, it is likely that the university has downloaded the documents before the next synchronisation. In this case, if you'd like to update information or transcripts/school profiles, you can use the School Optional Report to update.

If you have any questions, need further assistance or have some general feedback for us - we’d love to hear from you! Contact our Support team via Live Chat and by emailing hi@bridge-u.com.