I used to be an alumni interviewer for Duke. Here is how they did things.
- First review would be from an admissions officer (or sometimes a seasonal reader) who was trained on how to read apps.
- Ratings were given in 6 categories with a 1-5 scale: Quality of Academic Program, Academic Achievement, Recommendations, Essays, Extracurriculars and Standardized Testing. Highest score was 30, lowest score was 6.
- Second review was by an admissions officer familiar with that region/high school.
- Sometimes a third review is done for discordant reviews, or with legacy/special cases.
- About 10% of the applicants are “auto rejected” if the ratings are too low, and also similarly another set % is sent to the “admit” category.
- The rest of the apps are reviewed by committee. Committee votes to accept, deny or waitlist.
- Those in the accepted pile are then whittled down by the Dean of Admissions in a process he called “sculpting the class”. This is where the class is fine tuned for institutional priorities.
- Along with this alumni were invited to interview candidates. We turned in a short response along with a rating for each candidate. I don’t think the alumni reports were used much except to keep alumni engaged.
Recruited athletes had a different process, and they also carved out a few dozen seats for wealthy donor kids (development cases). Legacy students were reviewed alongside the rest of the applicant pool. Duke also had separate scoring systems for Engineering vs Trinity. The engineering rubric weighed test scores twice as heavily, and also focused on math/science grades.