How Much Time Does It Take To Determine Your Fate?
In a holistic selection process, how much time does an admission officer spend reviewing each application?
The following was written in response to a question I was asked on the website Quora.com:
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I have written about what I call fast and slow reads before, so I will cut and paste what I have written below my response to your specific question. The previous question was focused specifically on reading essays rather than the amount of time it takes to read an application, but the principle about time constraints in the same is the same.
Fast reads can be divided into two groups, depending on the kind of schools you are applying to. For example, if you are applying to top 20 ranked schools and you do not have the kind of academic program, GPA and test scores they are looking for and if you are not hooked in some way (athlete, legacy, under-represented student), then your application will be given a very quick read. Unless you have an incredibly compelling story or some kind or a special talent you will have very little chance of getting in and the application will filter through the system quickly (some pass applications along electronically; others have committees for those who pass through the first portal of selectivity).
On the other hand, if you are applying to less selective schools or if you are a resident of a certain sate (Texas, for example) then you are virtually guaranteed admission to some schools (U Texas if a student in state is in top 8%), so this application is not read in any depth. The further down the selectivity list of schools the more likely it is that if you have strong grades, academic program and testing and (and this is becoming increasingly important), if you can pay the fees, the more likely you will be given a fast read and admitted. Some schools may take more time in their evaluations if they wish to consider you for a merit or need based scholarship; otherwise, you are going to get in to 95% of the colleges in the US and there will not be much time at all spent on evaluating your application.
On the other hand If you are a very strong student applying to top colleges. then your application will pass through at least two and in most cases 3 or more readers. Virtually no one is a lock to get into top ranked schools who is not hooked. All told, the amount of total evaluation time might add up to 30 minutes, but it is fairly unusual for a application to get this scrutiny. A simple thought experiment might help to demonstrate why.
If a school gets 30,0000 applications and each one takes 30 minutes to evaluate, this adds up to 15,000 hours allotted to the entire pool. Assuming the school has an individual reader working 40 hours a week and doing absolutely nothing else except evaluations, then he or she could finish 80 application a week. Let’s say that reading season covers 4 months with no days off, then they could get through 1280 applications. The school would need a least a staff of 23 full time readers to accomplish this. Most schools do not have close to a budget to cover this amount of full time staff. Most schools expect readers to get to through between 120–150 applications per week. Most readers put in more than 40 hours a week to reach this goal, but the amount of time per application does not approach 30 minutes. 10 minutes per application is a lot but this is an average and some take longer than that but most are finished in under 10 minutes.
But it is worth remembering that employers almost never spend 10 minutes on a resume, and only a very small number of those who are passed through the resume sort get interviewed. A lot more students are given a moderately close read than people are given applying for jobs at top companies.
And while most of us like to think of ourselves as special snowflakes, 17 year olds tend to have similar courses, testing, activities, essay topics, and recommendation letters. It does not take that long to evaluate most of these things quickly. But quickly does not mean superficially. Someone with excellent training and some experience reading applications can make judgments effectively and efficiently.
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Do admission officers of colleges which receive more than 20,000 applications read each and every essay of all applicants?
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You have asked a great question. Thank you for asking it. Let me start by quoting James Carvel who once said “There’s the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Which do you want?”
I can’t give you “nothing but the truth” simply because I don’t have access to it. No one does. And I can’t give you the whole truth both as I cannot speak for the full range of application readers and I can’t speak for the policies and practices of thousands of colleges and universities. Instead, what I can give is a bit of the knowledge I have of what some schools do and what I myself did reading applications over many years. My answer, then, is limited, but I do think that what I will say might be applicable to more than just my own point of view, but I can’t back this up with quantifiable data.
A while back I posted a blog entry on Quora called Reading Fast and Slow: which are you doing right now? by Parke Muth on Posts .About 35,000 people have viewed it and hundreds have up voted it. I mention this as some of what I say there applies to your question. I won’t repeat what I said there but I will state that there are fast and slow reads when it comes to applications.
Fast Reads
There are actually several versions of what I call fast read applications. The first applies mostly to highly selective schools, but does filter down to the others too.
Among a group of 20,000 applications there are going to be some students who did not quite get the memo about finding schools within a realistic range. These students apply to some of the most selective schools in the world even though their academic credentials are, if not downright weak (there are a few of these too), then they’re at least not even close to the profile of admitted students. With websites like Parchment, students can easily get a good idea of their chances of being admitted. There really is not much of an excuse any more for submitting applications to schools with little or no chance of getting in. (There will always be pressure from parents or the students themselves, however, that impose a willful blindness, despite the data.) A student who is not close to the numeric rubrics is more often than not going to get more than a cursory read of his or her essays. Some schools or some readers won’t even bother.
The other group of fast reads comes from the opposite end. There are a number of students who have submitted numbers that are so strong that the essays won’t have much bearing either as these schools (usually not at the top of selectivity rate) take virtually everyone who has demonstrated they can achieve success via the numbers and academic program. Some of these schools may not get 20,000 applications, but many of them do as they are often State Schools with large numbers of in state applicants and those students have have done everything right academically and are residents won’t have to do a Proust to get in. To support my assertions I will quote Mitchell Stevens, whose book on admission, Creating a Class, is quite good. He knows how the process works based on spending time in an admission office. He has recently addressed the essay issue in The New Republic:
Applications with clearly high or low composite metrics, relative to the college’s overall applicant pool, were ruled on quickly. It was the files in the messy middle of each year’s applicant pool, whose numbers made them neither obvious “admits” nor clear “denies,” that got more extensive attention.
Yet even in these middling cases, personal essays rarely got even cursory attention from admissions officers. There were simply too many files to consider in too small a time frame, and too many other evaluative factors that mattered much more. How likely was an applicant to accept our offer of admission? Had we already accepted anyone from his or her remote zip code? Had the applicant received any special endorsement from a college alumnus or a faculty member? Did someone in the office owe a favor to the applicant’s guidance counselor? Those are the questions that get debated before a verdict is reached. But during the hundreds of deliberations I sat in on over two admission cycles, I literally never heard a decision made on the basis of a personal essay alone.
Stop Obsessing Over Your College Essay — Admissions Officers Don’t
Another way to approach your question is to frame it from the other side. If you were an admission officer and you opened up an application on your computer the first things you generally look at after the basic information contained on the Common Ap (and almost all schools that get 20,000 aps use Common Ap) is the testing and transcript. If a student is not in the top 20% of the class and has scores a couple of hundred points below the mean would you as a reader who has a huge number of applications stacked up spend a lot of time reading the essays? Honestly? Really? Even if you say yes, I would want to ask the same question after you had been doing this day after day week after week month after month. While stats can be deceiving they can be useful too. Students who are not close to the numeric rubrics of highly selective schools virtually never, ever get in unless they are a special (athlete, development case, under-represented student etc.). A typical student who is white or Asian who is not at or even well above the average set of scores with a great program, and great grades has almost no chance of getting in to the most selective schools. Let’s just say, however, there is a student with a set of essays so wonderful that if a reader would mull them over they might try to make a case t look past a low set of numbers. Now comes the pragmatics of a cost benefit analysis. If a school misses out on one great writer how much of loss is it to the school. If the school has to hire more readers in order to insure that all application essays are read carefully in order to find one or two a year is it worth it? If a reader has to put in many, many more hours reading over each application slowly is it worth it to them to put in overtime to do so? If a school misses one or two great voices each year will it hurt the quality of the class. And most importantly, thee are many great colleges and universities and if the student does not attend one there will be many others instead.
Let me end, however, with a description of one of my heroes in admission. She read applications for over 20 years and having watched her do this I can vouch for the fact that she gave every single student a close read. It did not matter the numbers the student presented. She felt this was only fair. She spent untold extra hours doing this. She had virtually no life except for her reading during many months. She has now retired but her example made me try to give more time to applicants who otherwise would have been signed off on perhaps a bit too quickly on my part. I can’t say in all honesty that I still did not employ some fast reads, but I tried to give anyone who was moderately in the running a fair shot. I can’t always say I got everything right, (an issue I have written about before ), but it wasn’t for lack of effort or concern for the time, interest and work that students put in to a far too stressful process.
Slow Reads
Students who have the numbers, program, scores strong recommendations, activities that predict involvement out of the classroom, get a slow read. But slow needs to be put in context. To read 650 words (the limit for the Common Ap prompt) does not take more than a few minutes. Some schools have supplemental essays but usually no more than one or two and these often have much shorter word limits. All told then it is unlikely that it takes more than 10 minutes to read all the words a student has submitted For those students who have spent countless hours fretting over picking a topic, brainstorming, writing draft after draft after draft , editing and getting feedback and doing final edits this may seem like a shockingly small amount of time.
Think of it this way. If you read a piece by a respected journalist or academic or anyone else that is published in places like The New Yorker or some other place how much time do you spend reading it. More often than not, it does not exceed the time admission readers put in reading student essays. Admission readers are trained to read and many have a background that prepares them for distinguishing quickly between good and bad writing. The cliché of choice in admission is that reading applications is an art, and this is somewhat accurate, but there should also be some science too. Applicants who write about research using details should know that readers have some familiarity with the kinds of things that student are doing. Some of these things are more impressive that what undergraduate students are doing and some kind of knowledge about the world that is being described in words is useful. Readers then get educated at least to be good generalists. They see thousands of essays if they have worked for a few years and they see that many fall into genres. It gets easier to pick those who come near the top of genres — for example, the “I have overcome much” essay or “I am poetic and creative” essay or “I have started my own business” essay etc.). I always found it fun to try to fight for students who were as they say on the cusp — those students who might not have quite the same numbers as others but had a voice that I was sure would add to the class. Some of them got in and ended up graduating at the top of the class and have since gone on to great jobs or great graduate schools in writing or other fields.
My belief and comments on an essay’s strengths does not always mean these students got in; my heart was broken sometimes when others did not agree with me, but I cannot say I have the ‘truth’ when it comes to knowing all things about students or essays. As I have written a great deal about essays on this blog I won’t go further into the mechanics of what makes a great essay here. I will, instead, end with this piece of advice.
If you have put a great deal of effort into your essays, then the experience itself will transcend whether you get into a certain school or even if a person read your essay quickly or slowly. Learning how to write is a skill that will help you once you are at your college or university and well beyond that too. Even if the essay is not a huge factor in many admission decisions, the skills you will have developed will follow you wherever you go. Best of luck.
