If your school is using the Common App integration and your students have paired their BridgeU and Common App accounts, please find the following steps to send out their teacher recommendations.
Step 1: Upload Teacher Recommendations. Please refer to this article to find out the two methods to upload teacher recommendations.
Step 2: To take necessary action on the Teacher Recommendation, whether it was manually uploaded by you, the school counselor/advisor, or requested by students, follow these steps:
- Select Document Sending.
- Locate the student and click on their name.
- Click the Send Common App Forms button, which is located on the top right corner of the Common App section.
- Find and select the Teacher Recommendation form you wish to submit
Note: If the student has requested a Teacher Recommendation and it is still in pending status, you will need to wait for the teacher to upload the recommendation. Once the teacher has uploaded it, the Teacher Recommendation title will become clickable.
Step 3: Within the Teacher Recommendation form, navigate to the University Selections section. From there, select the relevant institution to which the letter needs to be sent. You will be able to change the initial assignment in Step 6 below.
Note 1: If the university doesn’t require any Teacher Recommendations, it won’t show in the section.
Note 2: If the application has reached its limit for teacher recommendations, you won’t be able to select it.
Step 4: Review the rest of the form, if you are happy with the form, click Save green button at the bottom of the Teacher Recommendation form. If there’s any form error and you are unsure how to solve this, please contact hi@bridge-u.com to provide the name/email of the student and specify which teacher recommendation. We will look into this for you and advise further.
If you manually uploaded the Teacher Recommendation file, please remember to fill out the form on behalf of the teacher.
Step 5: After successfully saving the Teacher Recommendation form, you will be redirected back to the previous layer, the Common App overlay. At this point, you will notice that the Teacher Recommendation document bubble turns red, indicating that it is ready to be sent. On the left-hand side, there are tick boxes available for selecting the Teacher Recommendation forms you wish to send out. Once you have made your selections, the grey Send Teacher Recommendations button will become active, allowing you to open the Teacher Recommendation Sending Sendgrid/table.
Step 6: Within the Teacher Recommendation Sendgrid/table, you will find green ticks indicating your previous initial assignments for specific Teacher Recommendation forms in the Ready to Send section. It is possible to modify these assignments directly in the table. Once you are ready to send the Teacher Recommendations listed in the Ready to Send section, simply click the green Send button. This action will allow you to review the changed assignments before proceeding to send.
Hover over the info icons next to each University name to see the required and optional recommendation requirements for each school including Maximum, Available, Assigned and Submitted. If the info icon is orange this indicates that the maximum assignment has been reached. If the orange icon indicates the maximum has been reached but you are unable to select a tick box in the Ready to send section, expand the Overview to reveal and edit previous assignments where applicable.
Once Teacher Recommendations are successfully sent, a green confirmation banner will appear across the top of the SendGrid, indicating the successful transmission. The Overview section will automatically close to signify that only the Teacher Recommendations in the Ready to Send section of the table have been sent. Additionally, date and time stamps will be provided within the SendGrid, allowing you to track when each Teacher Recommendation was sent to Common App.
You can download our Teacher Recommendation Assignment spreadsheet in this Help Centre article. The spreadsheet can be used to communicate with your students to understand their preference of which teacher recommendation goes to which application.
Don't forget to check out our Document Sending Tips for the 2023-2024 season!
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.
You can also ask our BridgeU Community, a space exclusively for our BridgeU counsellors to ask questions, share insights, provide feedback and get help not just from BridgeU, but directly from other BridgeU counsellors.