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That increase in applications per student is totally rational, since students have learned just how random the process is. Admissions officer ate some bad sushi

by qq66 13y ago

That increase in applications per student is totally rational, since students have learned just how random the process is. Admissions officer ate some bad sushi last night and feels ill while he reads your application? Rejected. Admissions officer just got back from a long lunch outside in sunny weather? Accepted. It's not that simple of course, but there is a large random component. I considered applying to a lot of colleges a "hack" when I did it in high school since most people didn't accept that the process was highly random. But students have caught on since then.

derefr 13y ago
Given this, it might be nice if applications could be split into pieces, anonymized, and then each piece reviewed and accepted/rejected separately over different days by different people. (This would also mean that a re-application would look no different than an initial application.)
- qq66 13y ago
  Many universities do this, but usually only after the first pass of applications is removed. Also, even though 5% of the applicants are admitted, a much larger fraction of the applicants are completely qualified (i.e., if you selected a group of applications 3x the size you can admit, and then randomly selected 1 in 3 of those, you'd hardly be able to tell). So at that stage, multiple reviewers would help but not fix the randomness problem.
rkuykendall-com 13y ago
This is exactly what I did for grad school. I applied to an even distribution of schools across rankings, except at the top, where I applied to as many as I could. If you know anyone who got into a "top" school, you will also know they were rejected from many schools ranked much lower. It's just a guessing game at the top.
- bduerst 13y ago
  This is pretty hard to do when your mentors have to answer letters of recommendation for each school :( Many of them are questionnaires now, not just copy+paste.

by qq66 13y ago

derefr 13y ago

Given this, it might be nice if applications could be split into pieces, anonymized, and then each piece reviewed and accepted/rejected separately over different days by different people. (This would also mean that a re-application would look no different than an initial application.)

qq66 13y ago
Many universities do this, but usually only after the first pass of applications is removed. Also, even though 5% of the applicants are admitted, a much larger fraction of the applicants are completely qualified (i.e., if you selected a group of applications 3x the size you can admit, and then randomly selected 1 in 3 of those, you'd hardly be able to tell). So at that stage, multiple reviewers would help but not fix the randomness problem.

rkuykendall-com 13y ago

This is exactly what I did for grad school. I applied to an even distribution of schools across rankings, except at the top, where I applied to as many as I could. If you know anyone who got into a "top" school, you will also know they were rejected from many schools ranked much lower. It's just a guessing game at the top.

bduerst 13y ago
This is pretty hard to do when your mentors have to answer letters of recommendation for each school :( Many of them are questionnaires now, not just copy+paste.