As an oldtimer here, I’m fairly certain that Unifieds existed when my daughter auditioned in 2002. She planned to do her auditions on campus, though, so we didn’t investigate Unifieds. My guess is that far fewer kids took advantage of Unifieds back then than do now. We had visited all of the schools on her list prior to audition season and those visits, as well as others, helped in compiling the list of which schools were actually the ones she was interested in.
She decided to apply ED to Tisch as it was, by far, her first choice. All other auditions were scheduled at a similar time with audition dates through sometime in February. Her Tisch audition was in early November and she got her acceptance the second week in December. It was only ED at that time, which was binding. EA was not available at Tisch then. No deferral to RD either. About 1/3 of Tisch’s class came from ED back then. ED kids were also guaranteed the dorm they wanted.
Discussion of studio preference was a part of the interview during the artistic review. I’m not sure when that stopped.
Prescreens are fairly recent. Probably haven’t been around in more widespread use for much more than five years?