Yale changed the way it reviews applications?

[aficionado1b]

Ok I might just be very late to this and this 100% may have already been discussed, but I was doomscrolling through the Yale Admissions Podcast transcripts, and in Episode 26: Should I Even Apply? They list 6 “necessary but not sufficient” criterion to decide if you should even apply. This is how they summed it up in a diff episode but feel free to read the whole transcript:
You need to have a very strong command of English. You need to have a strong and consistent academic record that’s showing strength, especially in your most recent semesters. We need to see that you stepped up to the plate for the academic challenge, whatever is available in your context. You also need to have academic and personal integrity. We need to see that your academic interests align with the liberal arts approach that Yale is offering. And we need to see that you have the maturity, independence, and interpersonal skills needed to live on a college campus with lots of other people from really diverse backgrounds.
That’s not the new part though.
What I was thrown off about was Episode 30: Reading Reloaded, because they just casually dropped that they added an extra step to the application reviewing process. Instead of having a first reader that reads the whole application (they prided themselves on that in previous episodes btw…), they have a ‘senior’ reader look at the application in an initial review stage and look for the six criterion listed above to see if the app is even competitive, and then is like ‘oh it doesn’t need a full review’ and tells the area reader that.
Here’s their exact words:
And in this Initial Review stage, instead of taking notes like we do when the area officer first reads a file, what they’re doing is taking a look at the file as a whole, sort of a bird’s eye view, and determining whether it’s going to be competitive in the next stages of the process. […] So if an initial reviewer looks at a file and sees that it doesn’t meet these criteria or that it’s otherwise pretty clear that among the 50,000 applicants, this file is not going to be one that’s going to be considered by the committee, the reviewer can go ahead and indicate that the file doesn’t need a full review by the area admissions officer.
They then go on to say:
MARK: And we should make clear that the initial reviewer, in this case, has access to the full application.
HANNAH: The area officer still owns that file as part of their territory, and they’ll still bring it through the committee process and be responsible for getting it an admissions decision.

I might be fully overanalyzing and overthinking this, but this is looking a lot like the ‘weed-out’ conspiracy theories people have. Does this mean there’s a minimum gpa now to even be fully read? Any ideas on what that could be?

[ucbalumnus]

The admissions process is basically a weed-out process, where the first reading effectively rejects a large percentage of the applications at a highly selective college, regardless of who the first round reader(s) are.

[NiceUnparticularMan]

There has been quite a bit of discussion about this in other Yale threads.

A few potentially useful concepts.

I don’t think the implementation of a multi-phase process is a “conspiracy”, and in fact it is not at all unique to Yale. It is sometimes called fast-tracking, sometimes quick-look review, or so on. The general idea is that in response to the massive increase in application volumes, only some applications are getting a slow, traditional sort of review.

As is explained further in the Yale podcast, this allows them to make sure the competitive applications still get the consideration they deserve. And Yale was relatively frank about explaining it was a reaction to what they see as a large increase in not really competitive applications in very recent years.

But typically these colleges will still maintain it is a form of holistic review even for those applications that are not read the traditional way, it is just a very quick form of holistic review. So, for example, in this case Mark emphasized that the initial reviewer does have access to the full application, and the six criteria in question are still collectively holistic.

OK, so there is a lot of speculation in informed outsider discussions about what it takes to pass an initial review at Yale, or other colleges known to do something like this. And generally, they are not telling us the details. But this is nothing new, they never told us exactly what it took to get admitted.

As for your specific question, I have never seen Yale suggest they have a “minimum GPA”, and I am pretty sure that would not even make sense. Yale and others have frequently discussed how the lack of standardization means GPAs simply cannot be directly compared without adding context. And they apparently have all sorts of tools that help supply that context.

So I am personally quite sure the initial reviewer at Yale still looks at GPAs in context, using whatever tools they usually use to do that. But again, they don’t tend to give us the details, and to my knowledge Yale has not.

To sum up, yes this is news, and it is an understandable question what exactly it takes to pass this stage at any given college which has implemented it. But the fact we do not typically know the answer to that question is not new, because they have never been prone to share such information with us.