I’ve been trying to think of this lately from the faculty’s perspective. If a program gets 2000 prescreens that include 5 minutes of material that adds up to 166 hours of work just to do the prescreens!
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ahhh yeah ithaca was eerily fast last year for us on the prescreens. literally submitted friday and heard monday.
and the person who said she can’t figure it out YES! i had much more peace last year when i realized i couldn’t figure it out nor could i predict anything!!
you would think on my end it would
be less of a roller coaster this year. bc it’s her second go around she already has several full acceptances who said yes last year and then yes again when she reapplied.
but still!!! first three prescreens were no’s and then she couldn’t get into acceptd on 12/1 and had a meltdown.
today the pass came from
syracuse and she is way happier. it is a roller coaster, it’s random, it’s brutal and it’s all part of their life journey. the field they have chosen is exactly like!!!
i am trying to practice detachment as much as i can. seriously as they say in the 12 step
programs I am powerless over this outcome!!
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You have to remember that these are schools, not corporations. They work with limited staff (even worse since the pandemic), limited budgets and the recruitment season usually draws far more applicants for some schools than they can reasonably process. They also have classes to teach, students to advise, productions to mount. Some schools have dedicated recruiters but many would rather place that headcount in a teaching or director role. The process used to be FAR worse prior to the Papermill Common Prescreens. Each college would have their own requirements which would lead to 14+ different songs and cuts, 8-12 monologues and cuts and many, many dance prescreens. Some schools wanted 30 sec/45 sec/1 min/90 sec cuts, others 16 bars, other 32 bars, monologues from 45 sec to 2 min cuts, some wanted classical but no Shakespeare, some only wanted Shakespeare, some wanted contemporary but from particular decades or playwrights. This was a ridiculous amount of work for students in their Senior year. Applying and auditioning for 20 schools was a considerable amount of work. Kudos for the common prescreen and a way to simplify the process. All schools don’t use it but enough do that makes it reasonable and manageable. At LEAST the students in 2021-22 can use one song or monologue for multiple submissions.
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Thank you so much!! Wishing you all the best with your prescreens!!
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Thank you so much!! And congrats to your daughter on the prescreens she’s passed so far - extremely impressive and so exciting!! 
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My son just heard from FSU (Florida State) today 12/2. Unfortunately a no. (He has had some good yes’s tho).
Does anyone know about Illinois Wesleyan? Not sure with them if you are to schedule and audition before hearing about prescreens? (Like Montclair, where you can schedule an audition on campus and then it gets cancelled if you don’t pass prescreens)
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For us, my D had to pass the prescreen and was then invited to a callback. She heard from them pretty quickly. She already had her callback.
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My son also heard super fast from Ithaca. We were very surprised since no one else worked that way. He applied one night and heard the next day.
Congratulations to you.
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I have a friend who runs a BFA acting page on FB, and she would say…not that different! Extremely competitive!
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absolutely!!
Yes. I guess we just have to take it one step at a time and hope for the best! My S had his Emerson audition virtually which he said felt a little odd but he did his best. I think he’ll like the in-person auditions better. Good luck to everyone!
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Good luck to you son! My daughter is doing her Syracuse audition through a video and then there is a zoom component. At this point it is the only one she is not doing in-person. Syracuse said it really didn’t matter, while some schools said really try to come in-person.
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Pass:
Pace
Elon
Indiana
Point Park
Molloy
No pass
Ithaca
Syracuse
Penn state
Waiting on
CCM
Michigan
Arizona
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Thank you!! Good luck to your daughter!
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Probably the most useful post I’ve read in any forum. Thanks for that reminder!
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So Coastal Carolina is only doing in-person callbacks. No virtual, even though their page on getacceptd says they will have virtual. Yhey said that was leftover verbiage from last year. That stinks. D would not have applied there if we would have known. She is unable to travel. What a waste of time and money. 
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Trying to normalize posting poor results. Got a surprising NO from Otterbein yesterday afternoon (applied 10/29), I guess my D’s ballet vid was even worse than we thought, lol. So for the week we ended at our goal of 50%, 1 yes and 1 no, only 11 more to go!
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Costal Carolina has attended Chicago unified in the past fwiw
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I just got invited to a callback audition for DePaul’s bfa acting program!
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Congrats and good luck!