9 wk grades for ED 1

interesteddad
Wed, 07 Dec 2005 13:16:44 +0000

Oh, I don’t know what’s on the checklist. But, it’s just common sense. Prepare the acceptance letters. Notify the financial aid office, create an accepted student’s file, do whatever it is that colleges do to let other schools know that an accepted ED applicant is off the market, etc.

The school is closed over Thanksgiving and letters have to be mailed by the 12th or so. It only makes sense that they would start with the clerical processing as soon as each decision is made.

From reading the Gatekeepers, it is obvious that, in any given pile of applications, some are easy to accept, some are easy to reject, and the majority go to the next step where there has to be some further discussion.

My hunch is that a meeting takes place early on in the process where the Admissions Dean asks all the readers if they have any “auto-admits”. They all hand him their obvious acceptances, he reads the files, confirms the recommendations, and those go into the accepted pile. Those are easy meetings. Then, they move on to the harder work – deciding between a bunch of really good applicants.

Each admissions counselor at Swarthmore only had, on average, two or three dozen ED apps to review from his or her region. So, they have a pretty good idea after the first week which ones are going to sail through and which ones they’ll have to go to bat for and sell in committee.

I think that every applicant should go into the process expecting they’ll be one of the majority that has to be sold in committee.