DD2 submitted a few applications to meet the Nov 1 deadline on Tuesday I think. By Friday she got an email that she was accepted to one of the schools (a very respectable flagship state). Now, she’s fairly high stats and the school was a safety, but I’m not even sure they had all the materials at hand (esp. with SAT sending scores the way they do and Naviance doing its thing…) The family joke is that it was DD’s provocative essay about her political orientation that got the Robo-Adcom to trigger a ‘Y’…
In this day and age, even with electronic apps and Naviances and the like, are such admission decisions common? Just curious.
That happened with my daughter too - not for a state school though. She had submitted the common application, but not the supposedly required school supplement. The paper acceptance came within two days. It was a little disconcerting, because they have automatic merit scholarships based on grades and test scores. She had taken the ACT again, and was expecting (and got) a higher score, but the scores hadn’t been released yet at that time. She wasn’t eligible for the higher scholarship her new score would have earned, because they said only the scores and grades they had at the time of acceptance would be counted.
And such a quick acceptance made them seem a little desperate.
She wasn’t that interested in the school anyway - only applied because she might have been able to play DIII sports there. She’s happy playing on the club team where she ended up.
Our state requires the state-offered ACT scores to be listed on student transcripts, and some colleges use that in lieu of getting test scores directly from ACT. Given the admissions matrix (GPA/Test Score) it doesn’t take a lot more than the gpa and the ACT composite to determine that someone is way over the admission curve.
Things at least look to have been streamlined a bit application wise; not just with the Common App (this was not a Common App school) but even in general; when DD1 applied back in 2010 it was a hodge podge of horrible user interfaces that were outright hostile to use (I do this for a living). When DD1 applied to grad schools things were a lot easier, and now that DD2 is applying things are a LOT simpler. A welcome trend.
On the other hand, DD1 sent 14 apps to grad school Jan and Feb 2015 (in search of the elusive funding which she got). DD2 is applying maybe to 10 schools Oct-Dec 2015. So if there’s a metric for total college application, SAT, GRE, portfolio, and other fees in a calendar year, I’ll probably win it…
Wow @turbo93 that is a lot of applications in one year. Best of luck to all of your kids.
My daughter got a decision within three days of submitting her application at one school last year, before the EA deadline for the school and before her recommendations went in to the Common Application. She also got a scholarship offer there too. It was a state flagship, where many other family members had attended previously, and a high admit rate, so it wasn’t really a surprise.
My daughter was accepted very quickly last year by a small LAC, less than a week’s time. While she had stats that placed her in the top 25%, the swiftness was a bit startling. The only thing we could think of is she had sent her grades, tests scores and letters before submitting her application. She received at least one, but maybe two, more acceptances by Thanksgiving.
I am convinced that robo admits (great term BTW) happen at all the large state schools. The sheer numbers make it impractical to have a human personally make a decision. Using UNC as an example - 32,000 applicants. If it takes 10 minutes to review an application, that’s 5300 hours of effort to go through each one. The schools needs to pare that number down to something rational so they can give meaningful review. If they robo-admit, and also robo-reject students based on numbers alone, then so be it.
It’s all in the pursuit of the almighty funding. DD1 applied last to her current school (app #14) since it had a Feb 1 deadline. It was the highest ranked school and gave her a near full ride and teaching assistantship. DD2 originally wanted to cast a very narrow net (couple reaches and the match/safety state flagship where she’s guaranteed a near full ride) but being NMSF opens up a lot of funding opportunities, so more apps going out, sigh.
My D just applied to a directional public - She sent the test scores and transcript orders on the same day she submitted the college app online. Exactly one week later, she checked her online portal and she’d been admitted.
Yet, another regional public (in another state) she applied to took a full six weeks.
My son got admitted a week after he sent his app. A state flagship with less than 50% acceptance rate overall and his stats are just above average but not top 25%. The business school. nevertheless. I am in total shock because talking to other people I was under the impression that he did not even have good chances! Happy of course and it is a really good fit for him!
I’ll stand my my opinion. And that is an interesting report. From the appendix in the Berkeley report (10 years old, BTW) it would be easy to Robo-Admit the kids that score a 1, 1.25, 1.5, and so on until you reach some statistical threshold that makes humans step in and determine the real cutoff. Same thing on the low end - keep rejecting up to a determined level of uncertainty. In other words, don’t waste 10-15 minutes of a human’s time on something that can be done by pure formula - and in Berkeley’s case with 80,000 applicants, it makes even more sense. I don’t for a second think they wouldn’t have a machine in that loop.
3 of the 5 schools to which my D applied required neither essays nor teacher recommendations. They were state flagships with rolling admissions where my D’s stats were comfortably above their averages. She was accepted to 2 of them within a few days; the 3rd took over a week because they did batch processing and her application arrived at the start of a new “batch.” I know one had a mathematical formula; I’m not sure how the other two did it but we had assumed D would be admitted because her stats qualified her for automatic scholarships.
Re #15,
Yes, the report did discuss the methodology for human readers. It also spent a lot of effort to develop a statistical model for application data. The author was able to correlate very accurately his model to the human readers for very high and very low stat students. The human is needed in the middle.
Re #14
I would not want a student rejected solely on recommendation(s) that are negative.
DS had an acceptance from state flagship within 3 days of application. No essays or recs needed. Don’t remember if we’d sent the test results or not. Most time consuming part of the app was proving parental residency in the state, involved reporting when my state drivers license was first issued or some such silliness.
which she got). DD2 is applying maybe to 10 schools Oct-Dec 2015. So if there’s a metric for total college application, SAT, GRE, portfolio, and other fees in a calendar year, I’ll probably win it…