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Perhaps I’m allowing my day job to bleed too much into my after-hours life, but if a difference isn’t statistically significant, in what sense can it be said to exist?</p>
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But what factors would bias the admissions officers toward early applicants and away from RD applicants? </p>
<p>I’m also unclear why it wouldn’t be possible for a person to judge two rounds of applications with the same criteria, particularly when it’s a (fairly large) group of people judging the applications, and when they judge applications over the course of many admissions cycles. This sort of system seems to work well in other contexts – grant applications to the NIH, for example, are submitted in three groups each year and judged by review panels, and I’ve never heard allegations that any particular round is favored over another.</p>