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ApplyYourself is a website that a number of American universities use to accept school applications. Most of the universities no longer accept paper applications, so your choices are to use the website or forget about going to school. The second option is looking nicer by the minute. There are many things to hate about ApplyYourself. Here are a few of the basic ones: * it uses pop-ups * Javascript and a plugin PDF reader are required * passwords are alphanumeric * the login name (which you must remember) is a randomly generated alphanumeric string Another interesting feature is that the same login name and password are used to access your applications for all schools which use ApplyYourself. However, you cannot jump between applications--instead, you must logout, then log in to the next school. You're also not allowed to be logged in to more than one school at a time. Oh, and information which is common to all schools isn't automatically copied to each application; instead, you get to do it it multiple times. Naturally each application is similar, but subtly different, so that the information you're entering is the same, but the format is just different enough to discourage scripting. But that's nothing. The single most irritating aspect of the system is the way it handles HTML forms. The forms are long and detailed, but you cannot save them at intermediate stages. Instead you must complete the entire form before you can save/submit. Oh, and there's no indication of which fields are required. Yes, they are using Javascript, but not to tell you if your form data is valid. They'd rather use it to launch pop-ups. So your form is sent to the server. Gods help you if you make a mistake. You will be informed of your transgression, and allowed to alter the form, but while the text fields are sticky, the drop-down fields are not--they are all reset. One time I had to submit the form five times, because I made an error, corrected the error (but forgot to reset one of the drop-down boxes, which was of course a new error, etc). Today I spent about 15 minutes filling in a form about the last four jobs I've held (dates of employment, company information, duties, salary, and so on). Knowing how the forms work, I was very careful to check the form before submitting it. Alas, I failed. One of the companies I worked for has a name which starts with a number, and this does not accord with ApplyYourself's world view. Company names start with letters, and only letters! (Naturally, there is nothing in the instructions about this rule.) Even more disturbing was the fact that the error message implied that company names start with a capital letter, suggesting that they wouldn't even 'correct' it to uppercase on my behalf, had the offending number instead been a lower-case letter. So, instead of working on my essays, it looks like the rest of my evening will be spent filling in web forms (and that's in addition to the more than 10 hours I've already spent doing this). I'm sure my applications will be all the better for it.
Generated at 17:01 on 03 Oct 2006 by mariachi 0.52