<p>Just a few notes re cardfan: </p>
<ol>
<li><p>Stanford et al. are NOT “becoming much more holistic”. They have ALWAYS been holistic. You just tend to notice the difference it makes more when they have to reject so many qualified students.</p></li>
<li><p>“Holistic” is not code for “whatever someone feels like at the moment”. It does mean that there is no single set of criteria that controls, or any metric (like test scores) that dominates all others. One thing it definitely IS code for, however, is “we read the essays and they matter”. Another thing is “we admit students to foster cultural and ethnic diversity”.</p></li>
<li><p>Most universities, including Stanford, have extensive procedures to ensure that admissions decisions are NOT made by one person on an idiosyncratic basis. Usually, each application is read by at least two people, and either of them can advance it to the next level (or sometimes solicit other readers who would get involved in that decision). Applications are generally scored internally on multiple criteria by the readers, and there is usually a process for identifying and resolving gross score disparities on any particular criterion. The difficult decisions (which may represent 10-25% of acceptances, depending on the college and class size) are made by a largish committee, usually by democratic vote, subject to review by the Dean of Admissions. So, while an outsider may not understand or like the decisions, they are very meaningfully the result of a collective process, not someone’s daily whim.</p></li>
</ol>