The Common App opened for the 2026-27 admissions cycle on August 1. If this is your family’s first US application, the Common App is the online form used by more than 1,100 colleges. A student enters family information, school details, activities, test scores and the main essay in one place. Each college can add its own questions, essays and requirements.
August 1 is simply when the new application becomes available. The deadlines come later, and filling the form quickly brings no advantage. I would use the first few days to understand the form and check what each college is asking this year.
The main change is in the part where students report what they do outside class. The section has a new name, and students without a formal title no longer have to complete a title field.
How the activities section works
The Common App allows a student to report up to ten activities. For each one, the form asks what kind of activity it was, the name of the organization where applicable, the grades in which the student participated, when it took place and roughly how much time it required. There is also a short description, limited to 150 characters, for what the student did or accomplished.
An entry might be a school sport, debate, music, an internship or volunteering. Paid work, substantial family responsibilities, hobbies and independent projects have also belonged here for years. Common App’s own 2025 guide for students explicitly included all of these.
This section is closer to a compact record than an essay. A student has very little room, so the description needs to tell the reader what happened. “Helped with school event” says almost nothing. “Managed registrations and match schedules for 18 teams” gives the reader something to work with.
The old and new versions
Until last year, the section was called Activities. Each entry included a box labeled Position/Leadership description, alongside the organization name and the 150-character activity description. Common App’s official 2025 activities resource shows that earlier layout.
For 2026-27, the section is called Activities and Experiences. Current guides to the live application report that the position or leadership field is now optional. A student who held a formal role can still enter it. Someone who participated without a title can describe the work without having to put “Member” in a title box.
Most of the structure remains familiar. Students can still enter up to ten items, and the limits reported for the title, organization and description remain 50, 100 and 150 characters. Applicants who have already completed school also have dedicated fields for time spent on activities after graduation, which is useful for someone applying during a gap year.
Students could already list family responsibilities, informal work and hobbies last year. The renamed section simply makes that invitation more visible.
Why the optional title helps some Indian students
Indian schools differ widely in the number of formal roles they offer. One school may have an active student council, house captains, club committees and editors for several publications. Another may offer only a handful of named positions across the entire senior class.
The second student may still have spent serious time tutoring younger children, helping in a family business, caring for a relative, building an independent project or organizing local sport. Previously, students sometimes responded to the title field by upgrading ordinary participation into a grand-sounding role. The new form makes it easier to leave the title out and use the description for the work itself.
There is no announced change in how colleges will evaluate informal activities. Occasional help at home remains occasional help at home. I would include something from outside school when it occupied meaningful time, involved continuing responsibility or explains an important part of the student’s week.
The wording also fits a problem Common App has documented. In a 2023 study of activity reporting, Common App found that applicants from lower-income backgrounds reported fewer activities and fewer top-level leadership positions than wealthier applicants. The study covered US applicants and cannot be extended automatically to India. We see the underlying issue in Indian schools too: access to titles and organized activities varies considerably.
Do not manufacture an experience to suit the new label
Some families will see the word “experiences” and begin repackaging ordinary life to sound more substantial. I would reconstruct an ordinary week first. School, commute, coaching, practice, paid work, family duties and time spent independently learning or making something all compete for the same hours.
From that record, choose the commitments that took time or responsibility and that the student can describe honestly. A hobby does not need an organization name. Occasional household help does not need a managerial title. An independent project should say what the student made or investigated instead of borrowing the language of formal research.
Ten is a maximum, not a recommended number. Include every activity that adds useful information about how the student spent their time, and stop when the remaining entries would add little or repeat what is already there. Our earlier article on why profile building is often more about elimination than addition applies here too.
Georgetown, essays and testing
Georgetown now accepts the Common App as part of a three-year pilot for students entering in fall 2027. Its own application remains available, and Georgetown says it has no preference between the two routes. The change saves some duplicate data entry for students already applying elsewhere through Common App.
Georgetown still requires SAT or ACT scores, two short essays and two long essays. Students using the Common App are not required to submit its standard personal statement to Georgetown. They answer a Georgetown-specific personal statement question, although Georgetown allows them to reuse the Common App essay if it fits that question.
The seven main Common App essay prompts are unchanged for 2026-27. A student who has already begun a personal essay does not need to restart because the application reopened.
Students reporting English proficiency should enter their scores from the current score report rather than an old worksheet. TOEFL introduced a 1-6 scale in January 2026 and, during the transition, score reports show both the new scale and a comparable 0-120 overall score. The college’s own admissions page remains the place to check which English test and score it accepts.
If a student created a Common App account before August 1, answers saved in My Common Application, including the personal essay, should carry over. College-specific questions and supplements need a fresh check because they belong to the new admissions cycle.
Before you fill the section
Open the form and look through it, but draft the activity list separately first. For each possible entry, note the dates, approximate time, the student’s actual role and one or two concrete details about the work. Then decide which entries deserve the limited space.
Once the entries are drafted, put them in order and read them together. Do the hours make sense alongside school and coaching? Are two entries repeating the same project? Is an important family responsibility buried below a minor certificate? These are the decisions worth making before anything is pasted into the form.
At AltView, we review the activities list alongside the essays and the rest of the application. If you would like a second pair of eyes before submission, you can book a discovery call.
