Problems With Truncation On the Common Application

jaroslav writes "A combination of rigid caps on space and poor documentation of the space limits is adding stress on students applying for college using the Common Application, the New York Times reports. The story explains that the application lists word limits for questions, but actually enforces space limits. As a result, an answer with wide characters, such as 'w' or 'm,' may run over space even without reaching the stated word limit. It is not explained why an electronic submission must have such strictly enforced limits."

Comments

Not really a big deal.

[Registered Coward v2]

You print out your application, check to see if it truncates, and fix it if it does. They could say - "the essay must fit in an x by y printed space"; but then that would be confusing as well. I wouldn't be surprised if re-reading and editing actually improves the essay.

Solution: fix it.

[RightwingNutjob]

My favorite bit is the fellow quoted in the article who laments that he doesn't think there's a solution.

Not to be too arrogant, but anyone who knows basic geometry and how to stick two lines of code together should be able to at least imagine that there exists a solution. Is there really such a wide gap in the Two Cultures that not only does the other side not know how to fix a software problem, they can't even fathom that a fix is possible?

This reminds me of the Cargo Cult mentality mentioned in an article quoted a few days ago, here, where the view of the cult is that technology is an immutable force of nature, not a tool mastered by man, and the idea that man can wield it is so foreign as to be unthinkable.

You'd think that university administrators in the US and their ilk would be advanced beyond that. I feel embarrassed for the poor dumb bastard.

Re:Solution: fix it.

[Bacon Bits]

Solution: Use a fixed-width font when printing and change the limit to a character limit rather than a word limit.

Then again, these types of issues are often steered by people who have no idea how to manage a project or engineer a system. They fail to understand the problem or research a solution and instead pick the first solution they find regardless of how well it meets the needs of people involved.

Case in point: I work for a public school district. There is a county-wide initiative which requires additional testing forms to be filled out to determine if each district is meeting goals of the county-wide entity. The tests are all multiple-choice selections. Do they use a web-based form which submits to a database? No. Do they perhaps leverage the tried-and-true scantron forms that students have used for multiple choice tests for the better part of 30 years and the school has reams and reams of? No. Do they perhaps use the Canon copiers which they just leased and got a service contract for this year and are district-wide and have built-in document scanning? No.

Here's what they do. They want teachers to administer the tests. No problem there. Then they need to fill out specialized bubble forms which are downloaded using special login and passwords on a vendor website we don't control in any way. If passwords don't work then the teacher is out of luck for about a week. Then they use custom software and individual document scanners to scan these forms and encode the data for collection. These scanners are expensive, and the software is per-install licensed. There is only enough money for one scanner and software license per high school. So each high school -- some of which have 50 or more teachers collecting data -- now have a single kiosk computer set up to scan these forms which the teachers have to reserve time for. The few middle school teachers who also need to do this need to come to the high schools to do this work. The high schools and middle schools are not located close to each other at all. But it gets better. They alloted money for the scanners, but nothing for the computers. They're forced to cannibalize one computer from a computer lab in each school... all of which had classes at max capacity. I don't know what the teachers in those classes are doing for the student who has no PC. Additionally, the software is really picky. It requires you to calibrate the scanner. To calibrate the scanner, you must download another form and fill it out as requested using the same pen or pencil you used on the other forms. You must do this for each class -- that's right not each teacher, but each class -- because the forms can vary from class to class. The only saving grace of all this is that the scanners themselves are really nice and work very well, but they ought to at the price we're paying. We're just hoping that the volume these scanners will need to handle doesn't cause jamming. We don't have a service agreement on these scanners, so if they break we'll have to figure them out ourselves or buy more scanners.

This is what happens when you make a technical decision without consulting with technical people. You make everyone's life a living nightmare and waste hundreds of hours and thousands of tax dollars. You virtually guarantee that the data will not be gathered in a timely manner and that the project is likely to fail.

Not new; irony.

[kainino]

This problem has existed at least since last year (I applied last year) and presumably ever since the invention of the online Common Application. I find it amazingly hilarious and ironic that the problem is only getting publicity in the year in which the Common Application added warnings about the problem to the website. The obvious solution is to use a monospaced font and allow exactly the correct characters on the online form. (Note: some sections of the application already are in monospaced fonts. This should be easy.)

It is not explained why an electronic submission must have such strictly enforced limits.

It is because the form is actually just an online interface to a paper form. The warning tells you to look at the preview of the printed application to check for problems.

Re:E-mail address?

[jc42]

Nah; we'll still have email for a long time. The only thing is that it'll be called by lots of different names. This is one of the standard marketing tricks to convince the suckers^Wcustomers that you have something new.

For example, SMS, IM, and their ilk are crippled, nonstandard implementations email, repackaged with a different name so you'll think they're something new. Intentionally not making them interoperate with existing email systems is further "proof" that they're not really email; they're something that spelled entirely differently. But that (and their character limit) is about the only material difference. And the fact that you have to pay a lot more for email that's not called "email".

It's one of the oldest propaganda tricks in the book. It's sorta like saying "We didn't kill him; we just Terminated him With Extreme Prejudice." (Remember that one?;-) If you make up a new name for something, people will often believe that you haven't done the something that you're not naming; you've done something else entirely new that isn't yet covered by and laws, rules, or regulations. (The people who used that TWEP euphemism still haven't been tried for their crimes.;-)

But back to email; if you have a good email package installed, you may find that it also knows how to talk to most of those nonstandard "not-email" message-passing systems. It's not all that different for a message package to have a set of modules that interface to different message systems, whatever they call themselves. It's all the same job; you just format the headers differently.

Except that sometimes you have to truncate messages, because some of the non-email email systems have byte-count limits. Not much you can do about that idiocy except complain.

You misunderstand college

[Weaselmancer]

College isn't the ability to do something in a given field well. That is part of it, sure. But not the biggest part. What college teaches you is how to perform a long and difficult and often times utterly pointless task and be stubborn enough to see it through to the end. That's why lots of jobs have "college degree" as a requirement but they don't care which one you have. What they are looking for is someone who would move an entire bag of rice into a bucket and use chopsticks to do it and not complain. College will teach you this. This entry form is an example.

That's why the poster is confused about the bizarre space width requirement. It's a hurdle. That is its function. It doesn't have to make sense. It would be unrealistic if it did. PLENTY of things along the way in your education will not make any sense at all. It is important that you learn this. The task, whatever it is, must be done. And it must be done, and done in the way asked - regardless of how bizarre it seems. Or even if you have a better idea that would be faster/better/more efficient. No. Do it this way, in the way asked and the time allocated, and get it done.

It is the perfect training ground for life in the job market into which you will be dropped into here in a few years.

Re:You misunderstand college

[bky1701]

"College isn't the ability to do something in a given field well. That is part of it, sure. But not the biggest part. What college teaches you is how to perform a long and difficult and often times utterly pointless task and be stubborn enough to see it through to the end. That's why lots of jobs have "college degree" as a requirement but they don't care which one you have. What they are looking for is someone who would move an entire bag of rice into a bucket and use chopsticks to do it and not complain. College will teach you this. This entry form is an example."

How do you explain the fact that companies turn down people with length of experience well beyond the length of a college education then? I think you're wrong: it is just laziness. Sorting by degree is a quick and dirty way to sort applicants. Want someone normal? Batchelor's. Someone to be a contact person on complex matters? Masters. Someone to clean the toilets? Highschool. Having a big name university then puts your name higher to the top of the list. Experience, references, and having a degree in a relevant subject only matters after those two factors are taken into account.

Of course, then the company goes and wonders why all their workers are clueless and always accomplish things brute-force, and their so-called experts are less capable than Yahoo answers responders... so maybe there is some truth in what you say.

"It is important that you learn this. The task, whatever it is, must be done. And it must be done, and done in the way asked - regardless of how bizarre it seems."

So you're saying that the purpose of "education" is actually to teach you to shut up, sit down, and not question if things could be done better? Exactly what I have been saying for years. Why do we still put any kind of faith in degrees?

"It is the perfect training ground for life in the job market into which you will be dropped into here in a few years."

And yet no one seems to have any serious issues with this. I guess that is because everyone who is "smart enough" to be taken seriously knows how to shut up, and anyone who doesn't bend over probably is "too dumb" to matter.

As a society, yeah, we're screwed.

Re:You misunderstand college

[Weaselmancer]

After all, work is supposed to be tedious, and it's cheating if you find a way to automate the job, even if it saves the company millions.

Exactly. Wanna know why?

Because your boss and his co-workers that have worked there for fifteen years before you hired in made that system. Last thing in the world they want is some kid out of college making them all look stupid.

Sucks, I know.

Re:Educational Forms are horrible

[jc42]

You won't go to jail for not giving them your SSN.

Yeah, you're right. But you probably won't go to college there, either.

That's the problem with a lot of setups like this. Yes, you have a right to privacy. But they also have a right to not let you on their private property if you don't hand over the information they want.

We see this pointed out on /. all the time. The most common is the auto example: You don't have to hand over information like SSN to get a driver's license. But they also don't have to give you a driver's license. In the state I live in (which one isn't relevant here since lots have done this) the US government cracked down a few years back and ordered them to stop using SSNs as part of the driver's license number. Before this, mere citizens couldn't refuse to tell them the SSN, because this would mean that you couldn't legally drive in the state (or in any other, actually).

Ultimately, this sort of "forced" giving up of ID numbers is the reason we're having more and more problems with identity theft. Nearly anything you want to do to live normally in society requires that you give your id number to lots of organizations, who keep it in insecure computer systems. We're reaching the point that all the numbers needed for me to pretend I'm you are available for a reasonable price from lots of corporations, because you've "voluntarily" given them your numbers (and they've shared them with each other).

Why are they using a PDF form in 2010?

[93 Escort Wagon]

This BEGS to be an online form. As a matter of fact, I initially assumed (from the summary) that it was an online form, and the issue was the form created an FDF file for a PDF document that used proportionally spaced fonts - but then I saw the link to the PDF.

Our university does its grad applications online (maybe undergrad too, but I haven't worked with those). I put together an web-based system that ties into the university database - all the document handling and review activities are managed online. We used to shuffle around crates of paper (quite literally) - that's all gone, and the faculty and staff love it.

Why on earth is this "common application" not electronic, in the real sense of the word rather than this almost-as-bad-as-paper PDF abomination?