Top schools will often receiveds hundreds of thousands of well qualified applications while having an accpetance rate of 10% or lower. Assuming that most students that apply to the school are well placed in terms of grades, test scores, foreign language and extra curriculurs , how does the school discern between an accepted candidate and a rejected candidate ?
I have always wondered this …
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The selection process is usually kept a secret.
In general, there is a first pass where specific people are selected based on personal relationships with the institution. These people will still need to meet some minimum requirements, but they are much lower than the general population.
After that, depending on how many applicants there are, there would be an automatic filter of the students based on GPA and SAT score. The students that meet these minimum requirements are then broken down into several groups based on undisclosed metrics. If you look at a school’s “By the Numbers” stats, you can guess what those metrics are.
Then there are some junior people in the admissions department who actually read through applications. Figure if there are 10 of these people, they each might get 1,000 applicants, and their task is to narrow down that list to only 200 over the span of a few weeks, while providing some key highlights for each. Those 2,000 applicants are then offered interviews with alumni.
There could be 100 alumni interviewers who each interview 20 people. They would then pick their favorite 5, along with more key highlights. Those final 500 are then reviewed by a final admissions board one by one, where the group will, fairly quickly, vote each candidate.
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