Hi all, Stopping by and see that I’ve been tagged. Please just email me if you need to get in touch with me. I’m not able to check in regularly due to my workload. 
We don’t have criteria for admission. We look at the applicant pool we get an make our decisions from there. We’ve always been pretty up front about the fact that the Early Action pool tends to be the stronger of the two pools. [I</a> even write a blog post about deciding between the EA and RD options every year](Notes from Peabody: The UVA Application Process: How to Decide Between Early Action and Regular Decision for #UVA).
I wish people would stay away from making statements about the worthiness of other applicants. Most people don’t even know the full contents of their our applications, so it’s a bit odd to assume that you know what is in other students’ files.
Regarding financial aid, once they have a student’s package posted in their SIS account, an email will go out to the student telling them to check for it.
I hope that helps!