Step one is admission to the university. Step two is review for engineering. Last year, there were some hiccups in the new procedure . Engineering got ahead of the university acceptance cycles, which created problems(some students were offered engineering before they got the acceptance to the university).
My guess (and only a guess) is that will be addressed and not be the case this year. So yes, there were some review students who got notification much earlier than they normally would have. The problem they ran into was the number of applications received AFTER the first deadline, still entitled to automatic admit to the university & most likely higher rated students that they had to then figure out what to do with them. Review students are NOT required to wait for their decisions, there have always been a few reviews that hear early in the process – this new engineering process bumped that number much higher with their early answer promise.
The original (no longer valid) plan was to have the early applicant deadline be for anyone who wanted the College Station engineering campus - HOWEVER, that was overturned but the early date remained ( IMO no idea WHY it still exists – no additional commitment on the part of the early applicants). This made more sense for the review applicants to get an early answer with the OLD plan since applicants after the date would NOT be considered for CS Engineering. The current plan evaluates everyone up to Dec 1 as eligible for CS Engineering, early applicants just get early answers with no commitment needed on their part (?!) which last year did include review applicants. That does open the loophole of admission to the university given earlier to engineering review applicants – the way the system works, those students once admitted to the university can switch their major (it’s just a button you push online) so you could beat the system of the rolling admissions to major in popular majors. Did anyone do that last year? IDK, but it certainly was an easy option given there is no administrator approval involved to switch majors.
I haven’t seen this year’s info – did they promise a decision date again? Did they say those admitted to the university or just those who apply by this date? when they use to allocate the last 15% of the slots by holistic evaluation, they set a date ( if memory serves me it was Jan 15th), that you had to have admission to the university in order to be in the engineering major last 15% review pool. That had both automatic admits & review admits competing against each other BUT if you had not been admitted to the university by that date, you were out of the running. By the time those slots were being evaluated, the highly desired non-engineering majors were already full so it wasn’t an issue. New procedure, new timing, new problems – I wouldn’t count on a repeat of last year’s results. Each year they tend to tweak the process of admissions.
FWIW, you can direct submit your scores from the ACT or SAT by naming the school when you sign up. Those get processed the fastest. We had kids in our NSC who had scores at TAMU before they even were advised of their scores themselves. TAMU only counts the highest scores & ignores the rest - so it is not a risk to direct send( & it is cheaper 
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