Can students be admitted to a top university with no LORs?

Graduate School
1

<p>So I applied to 10 graduate schools in engineering. A week ago I checked the status page of one of these universities and it showed that 2 of my 3 recommenders did NOT submit LORs to one particular school. Since all LORs were submitted for every other school I decided not to worry about it at this late date and I just would get rejected from this particular university. However, 5 days later, I received an acceptance letter from this very college. I was a bit shocked since this is a top-ranked university that requires 3 LORs.<br>
I believe that there are only 2 possibilities:</p>

<ol>
<li><p>The university does not care about recommendations and the requirement of 3 is just a formality. I find this pretty unlikely.</p></li>
<li><p>The university actually received all 3 recommendations but the status page failed to update for 2 of the 3 recommendations. </p></li>
</ol>

<p>I have emailed various administrative ppl in the dept. but they were pretty unhelpful. They have just sent me an automated response basically saying that my question can be answered by checking the status page. So this leads me to my main question:</p>

<p>Can students be admitted to a top university with no LORs (or only 1 of the 3 LORs)?</p>

2

<p>A few of mine (all using the ApplyYourself system) have reverted to saying 0 of 3 submitted (they once said 3 of 3) in recent weeks. One of them has a manually posted message saying to ignore that. Still, showing 1 of 3 doesn’t make much sense.</p>

3

<p>If two letters were reported missing from a single university and all other programs received all letters, it seems more likely that the status page is inaccurate. I can think of several ways this could happen:</p>

<p>If the status page gets updated automatically, it may not register paper letters of recommendation. If it gets updated manually, there might be a backlog of materials not yet entered though they were actually received. (Last year GA Tech, for instance, had a backlog of more than a month. I was accepted before my application registered as complete…)</p>

4

<p>The status page probably just didn’t update properly.</p>