If your student is filling out the Common App activities section this fall, one line in it has changed, and it changes the number they should type. The hours field now says:
“Share how much time you typically spend during the busiest parts of the year. It’s okay to use your best guess.”
For years, the standard advice, ours included, was to average. If robotics took 20 hours a week during build season and 5 the rest of the year, you reported something like 8. That advice is now out of date, and a lot of students are still following it.
What changed
Hours per week now means the busy stretch. For that robotics student, the answer is 20, not 8. The Common App wants to know what the activity looks like when it is at full speed, not a blended number that describes no real week.
Weeks per year did not change. It is still every week you were actually involved. The robotics student who was on the team from September through February still reports roughly 24 weeks, not just the six weeks of build season. Don’t shrink the weeks because the hours now describe the peak.
What didn’t change
The numbers still have to be true. “Typically” matters in that sentence. The busiest stretch is a normal week during the busy season, not the one week before a competition when you barely slept. If debate season means about 12 hours a week from November to March, report 12, even if one tournament weekend ran 20 on its own.
A best guess is fine, and the Common App says so. A guess that could only be true for one exceptional week is not.
Your numbers no longer need to add up
This is the part students ask us about most. Once you switch to busiest-week hours, the totals can look alarming. Twenty hours of robotics, twelve of debate, and forty in a summer research program add up to 72 hours a week, which sounds impossible.
It isn’t, because those peaks don’t happen at the same time. Robotics peaks in winter, debate in spring, and research in July. Each entry describes its own busy season, so there is no single week where all of them stack. We used to flag lists whose hours added up past a certain total. We don’t anymore, and you shouldn’t trim an honest number to make a sum look tidier. Judge each activity on its own.
Redoing your list
Here is what the change looks like for a typical list. The first column is what a student would have reported under the old averaging advice.
| Activity | Old averaged hours | Busiest-stretch hours | Weeks per year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Robotics team | 8 | 20 | 24 |
| Student-founded app | 4 | 10 | 40 |
| Summer research program | 20 | 35 | 8 |
| Weekly tutoring | 2 | 2 | 30 |
Notice the tutoring row. Steady activities don’t have a peak, so their number stays the same. Only the activities with a real busy season move.
To redo each entry, name the busy stretch first (build season, tournament season, the month before launch), then estimate a normal week inside it. Leave weeks per year as the full length of your involvement. And one old rule still holds: 52 weeks a year should only show up for things that truly never stop, like a year-round job or caring for a family member. Most clubs and projects take a few weeks off.
Finding the honest number for a peak week
Students tend to guess these hours, and guesses drift high or low. We ask them to open an old calendar or group chat and rebuild one real week from each busy stretch: the week before the show, the tournament run, the heaviest weeks of a summer job. Write down that number and a line about when it happens, so the answer stays accurate if anyone ever asks.
If you already submitted
Don’t worry about it. Averaged numbers understate a commitment; they don’t mislead anyone. Update the fields before your next submission, and the colleges you apply to from here on will see the new numbers.
For the rest of the activities section, including how to write a 150-character description that actually lands, see our guide to the activities section.