Peabody is the building, Jack is the dog, and I'm Dean J (she/her, btw).

There are years of posts here. The search box works well, but please consider the age of the posts when you find them. The college admission process changes every year!

References to emailing updates to your application are from the years when we didn't have the current applicant portal. Please follow the instructions in your portal to submit all updates.

Welcome to the blog and thanks for reading!

Thursday, December 21, 2006

Radio buttons, check boxes, ethnicity, oh my!

My goal with our online application is to be easy, clean and neat. While bells and whistles are great on most websites, the online app needs to be simple and work well with different operating systems on your side and the databases on my side.

Earlier this week, I read a post on a discussion website frequented by "tech types" like myself bashing one particular part of our online application (the ethnicity question) because of our use of radio buttons instead of check boxes. The person decided that our use of radio buttons meant that we didn't understand HTML. A few others replied, some knowledgeable about databases and about reporting profile information like gender and ethnicity.

If you're going to answer the ethnicity question on our application (and you don't have to, it's completely optional), you have to pick something from our list. The last choice, unclassified, is for those who don't think the choices presented accurately describe them.


If you have an issue with the online application, call or email us. We try to monitor major websites for problems, but I'm sure we miss things!