How a Canadian Student Creates and Sends a Common App Application

Setting Up Your Account

Go to commonapp.org and select Create an account. Pick the first-year applicant path, since that covers a Canadian high school or CEGEP student applying straight to a US undergraduate program.

Enter your name exactly as it appears on your passport or provincial ID, because colleges match this against your transcript and any test scores you send later. You get one account for the whole application cycle, and you use it for every US college on your list.

Building Your College List

Inside the College Search tab, look up each school by name and add it to My Colleges. Common App lists over 1,000 member institutions, mixing large public universities, small liberal arts colleges, and a handful of Canadian and UK schools that also accept it.

Adding a college does not commit you to anything. It only opens that school's requirements tab, where you see its supplement questions, deadlines, recommender requirements, and application fee.

This is the biggest structural difference from OUAC . OUAC 101 sends one application to a fixed group of Ontario universities from a single list, and every school pulls from the same shared form. Common App works more like several separate applications sharing one core form. Every college you add still runs its own admissions process, its own supplement, and often its own deadline.

Filling In the Core Sections

The core application has fixed sections: profile, family, education, testing, activities, and the personal essay. These sections go to every college on your list exactly as you write them once. The education section asks for your school's grading scale.

Select percentage if that is what your Ontario, BC, or other provincial school issues, rather than forcing your marks into a 4.0 GPA field. Your counselor fills in the grading scale detail separately on the School Report, so the admissions reader sees both your self-reported number and your counselor's explanation of the scale.

Quebec CEGEP students list their CEGEP as the current school, not their old high school, since CEGEP is the level a US reader compares against grade 12 in other provinces.

Fields Built Around the US System

Some fields assume a US applicant and do not apply to you. Leave the Social Security Number field blank.

Select Canada as your country and mark yourself as a non-US citizen where the form asks for citizenship status. The testing section asks whether you are submitting SAT or ACT scores, or lets you mark that you are not, at colleges with a test-optional policy. Canadian universities generally do not require these tests, so check each US college's own testing policy rather than assuming your Canadian application experience carries over.

Inviting Recommenders

Under the Recommenders tab for each college, add your counselor and teachers by email. Common App sends them an invitation and a FERPA release request, and each person submits their letter directly through the platform once you submit that release.

A single teacher recommendation can cover every college that requires one, so you invite each recommender only once, not once per school.

Tracking What Each College Still Needs

Your dashboard shows a checklist per college: transcript, School Report, recommendations, test scores, and application fee. Some of these items, like your transcript, arrive from your school rather than from you, so a checklist item can update days or weeks after you submit your own sections. Check back regularly rather than assuming submission means the file is complete.

Paying and Submitting

Each college sets its own application fee and its own fee waiver policy, so check that college's requirements tab before you submit. Common App itself does not charge you to create an account or add colleges.

Submit each college separately once its supplement, recommenders, and fee are complete. You can submit some colleges on your list before others are ready, since submission happens per school, not all at once for the whole list.