I would be surprised if they're ranking every applicant. When I've been on hiring or admissions committees, I use a threshold. There's no point in ranking candi

I would be surprised if they're ranking every applicant. When I've been on hiring or admissions committees, I use a threshold. There's no point in ranking candidates clearly below the bar relative to each other, and there's no point in ranking candidates clearly above the bar either. For applicants on the bubble, it's often easier to decide for each individual whether you should interview him or her or not, and let the final number of interviews be somewhat fluid, than to rank them against each other. Obviously, one could conduct an ex post ranking based on the decisions, but I wouldn't put a lot of weight on it. I do agree that one should try to go back and check how the decisions worked out in a systematic way, but it's not obvious that there's an easy way to do it (and by "easy" I mean "a way that anyone will adopt for long enough for it to be worthwhile.")