Admitting the process

On any given day, more than 100 prospective students and their parents shuffle through the door to the admission office reception area in West College for an interview. They sit and skim the "Letter to the Prospective Class of 2005" and listen for their names to be called for group interviews with admission counselors.

Some are visibly nervous — anxiously chatting or sitting silently erect — while some exude controlled self-confidence.

And as they wait, about 30 admission staff members work, assembling each applicant's personal file while combing it for details that could lead to an eventual acceptance or rejection.

With so many variables to be considered within the short period available for reviewing Early Decision applicants, the process by which the admission office admits prospective students has been crafted to be as expedient as possible.

That process has two principle components.

First, the support staff "preps" an application — consolidating the critical academic and extracurricular information about each prospective student onto a two-sided, thick, canary-yellow form.

And from that small card, the process continues.

The front lists all the necessary biographical and academic information — name, address, classes taken, unweighted GPA recalculated by the office and SAT and AP test scores, among other things.

On the back, admission deans remark on and evaluate the less rigid elements of the application. At the top of the page, one box lists extracurricular activities, another notes legacy status. Further down, each of the four essay questions has a line for deans' reactions.

There is also a space at the bottom reserved for readers to jot down their general impressions of the candidate.

The actual application reading process resembles a relay race, as each applicant's folder is passed to subsequent readers like a baton.

One of the four associate deans leads off the process by skimming the application to assign the student two numerical grades.

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Using a rating scale ranging from one to five — one representing the best — the associate dean evaluates the applicant for both academic and non-academic achievement.

A junior officer, another associate dean and the dean of admission run subsequent legs of the race, reading the applications and jotting down impressions on the yellow card.

Acting Dean of Admission Steven LeMenager estimated that the three readers combined spend about one hour reading and evaluating each 12-page application.

"The first reader might take 30 to 45 minutes to read the application through, and the second and third readers would take less than that. It might be 15, 10 or 20 minutes, it just depends," LeMenager said.

And with about 1,850 early decision candidates this year, that adds up to about 2,000 hours of work during a six-week period for the University's 13 admission officers.

The procedure occurs entirely on paper, with associate deans voicing their opinions in a few paragraphs of writing with hardly a word exchanged verbally.

And for every Early Decision applicant, LeMenager makes the final decision. About 45 percent of the Class of 2005 will be determined through this process.

LeMenager said he believes having one person responsible for all the decisions — though stressful and time-consuming — provides a degree of accountability in the admission process.

"I am the arbiter, but it's not a conversation. It's up to the dean to make the final determination," LeMenager said. "It's a lot of work for the dean's office, but that is the process decided on by the trustees and faculty."