Dashboard & progress

The dashboard leads with application readiness: how much of the actual work is done , rather than with points. Game mechanics exist but are deliberately secondary.

Readiness

The headline percentage is the mean of four module scores:

These thresholds mirror the Common App's own limits, so 100% means “you have filled the form”, not “you will get in”.

Navigation, and what changes on a phone

On a desktop the dashboard has a sidebar: eighteen links in five groups, with your avatar, level and XP bar at the bottom.

A phone gets the same destinations arranged for a thumb instead. Four tabs are pinned to the bottom of the screen — Home, Colleges, Essays and Work — and More opens a sheet containing everything else, grouped exactly as the sidebar is. Your level, credits and XP bar move to a slim bar across the top, and tapping your avatar there opens your profile.

Both are built from one list, so a section can never appear on one and not the other. If a message is waiting in your talent inbox, it appears above the page content and puts a dot on the More tab, because it is the one thing in the product with another person waiting on your reply.

Pinch-to-zoom is left enabled everywhere. Text fields are set at 16px so iOS does not zoom the page when you tap into one.

Counselor tasks

If your school assigned you anything, it appears above the generated quests. A real person asking outranks anything the app inferred. Ticking one off awards 30 XP and reports completion back to your counselor. See Enterprise console.

Quests

Ten generated milestones ordered by what unblocks the most downstream work, not by what's easiest. A student with no college list cannot write supplements, so the list comes first. Completed quests collapse into a summary; the next four incomplete ones are shown.

Deadline radar

Merges four sources into one countdown, sorted by urgency:

• Application deadlines for colleges you haven't submitted
• Deadlines for opportunities you saved or applied to
• Financial aid items still open
• Reminders you set yourself

Items more than three days past due drop off. Pills turn amber inside 30 days and red inside 7.

XP, levels and badges

Collapsed into a single expandable panel. XP accrues from concrete actions; levels follow a quadratic curve (50 × (level − 1)²) so early progress is fast. Ranks run Seedling → Explorer → Scout → Pathfinder → Trailblazer → Contender → Standout → Finalist → Luminary → Legend.

Anti-farming

Milestone awards carry a dedupe key, so “first essay drafted” cannot be re-earned by re-saving. Repeatable actions (adding a college, logging an activity) award every time because doing them more is the point.

Badges

Twenty badges, re-evaluated on every page load against your current stats. Avatar headgear unlocks at levels 3 (headband), 5 (party hat), 8 (graduation cap) and 10 (crown). Premium adds a gold ring and purple aura on top.

Major playbook

A short list of concrete extracurricular moves matched to your intended major, with an honest effort rating. Undecided students get exploration prompts instead.