<p>The honors programs run their interviews and admissions processes completely apart from the university, so a student actually can be admitted to an honors program before they are admitted to UT (*the student will never know this though, because UT and Honors programs tend to release their decisions around the same time). However, once a student is admitted to that honors program, UT Admissions makes sure they don’t have an issue with the student being admitted, and then admit them.</p>
<p>This is how some unranked students have a really good shot when they apply to an honors program. Since UT assigns a rank, sometimes non-ranking school students are disadvantaged, but since honors programs do a holistic review, they will admit these students “easier” than UT does, since UT as a whole does not have a holistic review.</p>