Any school official who holds your academic record can be your counsellor on the Common App: the principal, vice-principal, a coordinator or your class teacher. The Common App has no requirement that the person hold the title. What it needs is one person who submits the transcript, the school report and a short letter from a school email address, and who can describe the school as well as the student. Most Indian schools have no counsellor, and admissions offices read hundreds of files a year from schools that do not.
The question comes up in almost exactly the same words every year. On Quora it is asked as "My school doesn't have a counselor. I thought of putting my principal which is also my teacher. Can I put him on both teacher and counselor section on common app?" On The Student Room a CBSE applicant writes that the school "is being super non-supportive" and asks whether the referee has to be a teacher who taught them. The answer to the first is that the roles are best kept separate, and the answer to the second is no. Neither is the real difficulty. The real difficulty is that a Common App school report assumes a school that produces documents no Indian school produces, and somebody has to produce them. That somebody is usually the student.
What the school actually has to send
Through the Common App a selective college expects the following from your school, all uploaded by the counsellor through their own recommender account.
The school report and transcript. One form plus your marks, submitted together. The report carries the school's grading scale, your record in the school's own terms, class rank or a grade distribution where the school produces one, your Grade 12 subjects in progress, and a short letter placing you in the school's context. The counsellor may attach a school profile alongside it, and should.
The counsellor recommendation. In practice this is the letter attached to the school report. It is not a second document at most schools, and it is not meant to relist your activities. It is meant to say what the school offers, what it does not, and what you did inside those limits.
The international supplement, where a college asks for it. This is a separate Common App form and not every college uses it. It asks the school official for the primary language of instruction, whether promotion in your system depends on standard leaving examinations set by a state or national board, whether you have already sat those examinations, an official copy of the results if you have, predicted results if you have not, and the school's marking scale with its approximate equivalence to the American A to F scale. That last field is the one to watch, because it is where a school can accidentally convert a CBSE 88 into a B and undersell a whole transcript. Our guide to how US universities read Indian marks explains why the school should give the scale and the distribution rather than a conversion.
The mid-year report. Submitted in January or February with your latest marks. A CBSE or ISC student has no board result then, so the school sends the half-yearly or pre-board marks.
The final report. Submitted after you finish school, with the board result. Note the sequencing: once the final report has been sent, the counsellor recommendation, mid-year report and optional report can no longer be submitted, so nothing should be left until the end.
Two teacher evaluations, which are a separate matter covered in our guide to recommendation letters from Indian schools.
Choosing the person, and keeping the roles apart
The counsellor should be whoever holds the record and can speak for the institution. In descending order of usefulness that is normally the principal, the vice-principal or senior-school head, the Grade 12 or IB coordinator, and the class teacher.
If your principal also taught you a subject, invite them once, as the counsellor, and use two different subject teachers for the teacher evaluations. Each person you invite is given a role for your application, and a single individual carrying two roles gives the reader one voice where the file is designed to have three. The exception is a very small school where nobody else taught you an academic subject in Grade 11 or 12, in which case say so plainly in the additional information section rather than leaving the reader to guess.
The email address matters more than families expect. A recommendation arriving from a personal Gmail account is the shape most application fraud takes, and readers know it. Ask the school for a domain address for the person who will act as counsellor. If the school genuinely has none, have them write the school's name, their role and a school landline into the letter itself.
The school profile: write it yourself, have it signed
Almost no Indian school has a school profile, and it is the single most valuable document a student can get into their file. Without it the reader has no way to know whether a 93 percent is ordinary or exceptional at your school, whether the school offers electives at all, or whether the absence of a research programme is your choice or the school's constraint.
Draft it, take it to the counsellor for correction, and ask for it on school letterhead. One to two pages, covering:
- Board and curriculum, the subjects and streams offered, and any electives or AP courses. Say explicitly if there are none.
- The marking system, and what the distribution looks like: how many students in the graduating cohort scored above 90, above 95. A distribution is worth more than a rank.
- Size of the school and of the Grade 12 cohort.
- Facilities relevant to academic work: laboratories, library, computing, and again, what is absent.
- Where recent graduates have gone, including Indian universities. A school that sends students to IITs, NLUs and DU is telling the reader something useful even if it has never sent one abroad.
- Any context the reader would not guess: a school in a small city, a school that switched boards, a year disrupted by something.
The method's fourth step treats the school documents as part of the argument the application makes, not as paperwork, and this is where that shows. A student who built a research project with no school laboratory is a different applicant from one who had a laboratory and a mentor down the corridor, and only the school profile makes that visible.
Briefing a principal or class teacher who has never done this
Give them one page, in person, and then by email. Not a draft letter. A brief.
- What the Common App is, what a school report is, and that it is submitted online through their own account in about forty minutes once set up.
- The exact deadlines: 1 November 2026 for early rounds, early January 2027 for most regular deadlines, mid-January for the mid-year report. The 2026-27 deadlines calendar is the version to print for them.
- Three or four specific things you did inside the school, with dates and the name of a teacher who witnessed each. Facts, not adjectives.
- What you intend to study, in three sentences.
- The school profile draft, for correction and signature.
- An offer to sit with them the first time they log in.
Do this in July or the first week of August, before Grade 12 begins in earnest and before the school's own examination calendar takes over. If the school insists on issuing one template letter for every student, the teacher letters carry the weight and you can note the school's practice in the additional information section without complaint or excuse.
Predicted grades, and why the timing hurts
A CBSE or ISC student's board result arrives in May, after every US decision. So a US college reading your file in December sees Grade 9 to 11 marks, Grade 12 internal marks, and, where the international supplement is used, the school's predicted results for the boards.
This is where Indian schools most often refuse, because predicting a board result feels to a principal like a promise rather than an estimate. It is neither unusual nor risky, and the school is not held to it. Ask in July, ask in writing, and ask for a prediction that is honest rather than flattering, because a predicted 98 followed by a real 88 is worse than a predicted 90. The mechanics, including what to do when the school will not, are in our guide to predicted grades from Indian schools.
The FERPA waiver
Before you can invite any recommender, the Common App asks you to decide whether to waive your right, under a US law called FERPA, to read your recommendations after you enrol.
Waive it. A letter the student can read is discounted by the reader; a letter the student cannot read is taken at face value, and teachers write more freely knowing that. The decision is made once, applies to every college and every recommender you invite, and typically cannot be changed after your first invitation goes out, so make it deliberately rather than by clicking through. No college may require the waiver as a condition of admission or of financial aid, which is why it is presented as a choice at all.
The related mechanic worth knowing: recommenders are invited from within the application and then assigned to individual colleges, so a college added in December still needs the recommenders assigned to it. Check the dashboard rather than assuming.
If your school is not in the Common App list
Search for the school in the education section. Many Indian schools have a CEEB code from College Board because students sit the SAT there. If yours is not listed, the form has a checkbox to say so, and you enter the school's full name and postal address manually in plain English characters. This is routine and carries no penalty. A school can also apply to College Board for a code, though not usefully inside one application cycle.
What to do this month
If you are in Grade 12 now, do these in the next two weeks. Ask the school in writing who will act as counsellor and confirm they have a school email address. Send the one-page brief and the school profile draft. Invite the counsellor and both teachers from the Common App after completing the FERPA question. Then check the dashboard in the second week of October, not the last week, because a recommender who has never used the system usually needs help once. The rest of the autumn sits inside the Grade 12 timeline, and the college-by-college document requirements are on the US destination page.
If you are in Grade 11, the useful move is earlier and smaller: find out now whether anyone at the school has ever submitted a Common App school report, because if nobody has, you are the person who will teach them, and that is a July job rather than an October one. This is the kind of school-side groundwork our college admissions counselling handles alongside the family, since a 17-year-old asking a principal for institutional documents is a conversation that often goes better with an adult in it.
Where this advice stops
This covers the Common App, which is what most US colleges use. It does not cover the Coalition application, the University of California application, which asks for no recommendations at all, or MIT and Georgetown, which run their own systems with their own school forms. It does not cover UCAS, where a single school reference replaces all of this. It assumes a school that is willing but inexperienced; a school that actively refuses to submit documents is a harder problem, and the only remedies are a different school official, a direct email from the family to the admissions office explaining the constraint, and, in the last case, a list weighted towards the UK, Canada, Australia and Singapore, which do not need school letters. And none of this substitutes for the record itself: the best school report in the world describes what a student did, and it cannot manufacture it.