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:
Click on Document from the left side menu.
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 click on 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 their recommendation, the Teacher Recommendation title will show in pink and it will be 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. This is not a final selection, and 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 but you will see a note informing you.
Step 4: Review the rest of the form using the sub-menu to move between sections. If you are happy with the form, click the pink Save button at the bottom of the Teacher Recommendation form. If there are any errors in the form and you are unsure how to solve this, please contact [email protected] 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 pink, indicating that it is ready to be sent. On the left side, there are check 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: The university selection that was made in the form will pull through to the selection page, though this selection can be changed simply by ticking/unticking the checkbox next to each university name.
The requirements are shown for each university in the student’s application list, so you can always be sure of the minimum and maximum number you can send.
Make your selection and click the pink Send button, and then confirm your choice by clicking Send again.
If the info icon next to a university is orange, this indicates that the maximum assignment has been reached. When the maximum has been reached, you are unable to select a tick box in the Ready to send section, so 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.
The Common App overlay page will also show the Teacher Recommendation as a green bubble indicating it has been sent successfully to at least one of the universities on the student's application list.
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 2025-2026 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 [email protected].
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.