<p>the GPA screen doesnt quite make sense. Ive known and heard of numerous students who did not have “straight A’s” and still got in.</p>
<p>The minimum approximate stats indicating someone has the academic background to “qualify” for Harvard ( meaning they would be able to graduate from harvard if admitted) are an unweighted 3.0 and SAT scores of at least 1800. Obviously, most accepted students have far better stats. Probably few people get in with the minimum stats, and those are students like recruited athletes, offspring of multimillionaire donors, and students who have overcome major challenges such as being homeless.</p>
<p>One doesn’t need straight As to get into Harvard. There are many straight A students who are rejected in favor of students with lower grades and stronger ECs or other attributes that would contribute to creating an active, well rounded student body.</p>
<p>The average American adult reads 250 to 300 words per minute. Let’s assume that Harvard app readers go a bit faster than that, about 400 wpm, since it is, after all, their job and they know they’re short on time.
The average ComApp essay for Harvard is probably somewhere around 700 words, while the average optional essay, which we’ll say 1/2 of the population submits, is 600.
I’m not sure, but it’s likely that readers work from 9-5, though I assume they’re used to going overtime during application season. That seems like eight hours, but there’s lunch, getting distracted, going somewhere else for a bit, so we’ll say there are 6.5 solid hours of work daily.
The adcoms have 4 months to work with. That comes out to about 76 days after holidays and weekends.</p>
<p>So what does that come out to?</p>
<p>30000000 words is 75000 minutes which is 1250 hours.
The adcoms have 494 hours each.</p>
<p>So, working with my conservative estimates, it would take just over 2.5 admissions officers to read all of the essays. Harvard has many more. I’m not sure how many, but MIT, as I counted from one of the Blogs with pictures of everyone, had 27. Dartmouth says it has 13, with some additional readers. So Harvard almost certainly has above 20. If we say Harvard has 20 and that they work for 76 days in admissions season for 6.5 hours a day, Harvard has 9880 man-hours. After using 1250 of those just for essay reading, there remain 8630, which I think is plenty of time for all of the creation of files and organization and debates over borderline applicants.</p>
<p>Of course, my numbers may be totally off, but I think its unreasonable to think that Harvard comes anywhere close to throwing away something like half of applications. Don’t freak.</p>
<p>Not sure about Harvard BUTBUT Yale has regional admission officers!!! I know for a fact Harvard has geographical and racial quotas which means not all applications are read at Harvard that would be insane for those of you who are saying they read 300 + apps a day. </p>
<p>Obviously they filter the low SAT and GPA people but then again WHY wouldn’t they put a cutoff score for all applicants to know so that these students don’t have to spend the time filling the harvard app and the harvard people don’t have to waste the time flushing these apps away??</p>
<p>The harvard apps are read by your regional officer which means the apps are separated by possibly 30 + groups of officers.</p>
<p>Its Harvard. Of course, they can handle it. But how? I was thinking like a board of members with gray hairs scratching their heads looking for inspiration inside of a student.</p>
<p>wow 30000 applicants thats crazy!!!</p>
<p>Burn 25000 and read 5000. </p>
<p>Everyone’s about the same anyway.</p>
<p>Regional Officers, or the applications are divided up in some other arbitrary way. Then, one or few (depending on the college) admission officers examines all the applications in the group, dividing them up into a number of piles, depending on the college. For simplicity, let’s say three piles (probably rejected, debatable, and probably accepted). The probably rejected pile gets most of the applications, let’s say half to keep things easy. This does not mean the applications are not read! So we’ll say there are ten groups. The groups all come together and then go through each and every application, yes, all 30,000, examining the recommendation (based on the pile) of the original reader, but ultimately making the final decision as a group. So, some applications may only take 15-30 seconds to put in the rejected pile, while others may take 10 minutes to debate, especially when it comes to competitive and similar applicants.</p>
<p>i still like my idea earlier that the admission office use witchcraft to summon John Harvard to help them pick the applicants. its the only logical way…</p>
<p>in any case, i wish they would spend a decent time looking at my application.</p>
<p>This is a very important topic and it will be good if someone who has been on adcom or familiar with the adcom weighs in on this. Logically this is what would happen: All 30,000 are not ready the first day, there are few which are more or less complete. The adcom start looking at what they have and put it into a set of piles of varying degrees of acceptability. I am sure there are few they reject right away (not worth wasting more time), some are put in more iffy type file which they will get back for look later when the file is complete, some high potential that need to be looked at seriously even though the file may not be fully complete etc.</p>
<p>That way they might whittle down the 30,000 through a series of steps to something more manageable (say 5,000) which go through multiple reads, discussions, clarifications and final decision making. Again this is just conjecture, but it has to be some what in those lines.</p>
<p>All of us know that the there is a lot of subjectivity in analysis of the final pool. Getting down from say 5000 to 2000 final offers takes time and lot of work. I am curious as to how they whittle down from 30,000 to say 15,000 or 10,000. It has to be more rule based, possibly with some automation. Anyone wants to weigh in or even tell me I am off base and that the elite universities do something else.</p>
<p>This is what the dean himself said about the admissions process:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Source: [Guidance</a> Office: Answers From Harvard’s Dean, Part 1 - The Choice Blog - NYTimes.com](<a href=“Guidance Office: Answers From Harvard's Dean, Part 1 - The New York Times”>Guidance Office: Answers From Harvard's Dean, Part 1 - The New York Times)</p>
<p>"I know for a fact Harvard has geographical and racial quotas "</p>
<p>I am very sure this isn’t true because having racial quotas would be illegal.</p>
<p>Very informative post, GuiltyBystander.</p>
<p>Actually, historically speaking, they have always had this quota. In this day and age, however, I’m sure it is a lot less prominent. but old habits die hard, so:
[Getting</a> In : The New Yorker](<a href=“http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/10/10/051010crat_atlarge]Getting”>Getting In | The New Yorker)
I think that college admissions are totally subjective. a student from a given region might not be considered “good enough” as another student with the same credentials from a different region might be considered perfect for Harvard (different regions= different adcoms = different perspectives/beliefs). maybe you’re asian and an asian admin officer reads your app/essays/recs and really connects with everything he sees. maybe you’re asian and your admin officer is slightly racist. it’s all subjective. you can only hope that whoever reads yours likes you!!</p>
<p>I suppose that actual quotas are illegal, but all of these elite universities do admit to crafting their classes to encourage diversity. This inherently leads to some ‘quotas’… Instead of taking many excellent candidates from a geographic region that is known to be competitive, they might take a candidate with lower scores from a region that doesn’t traditionally send many people to Harvard. And then, there’s always affirmative action…</p>
<p>I don’t think they have actual quota, but they do take geographical location into account for international students: From my country (a small, relatively underrepresented country in Western Europe) most top colleges usually only take one or maybe two (or none at all!) candidates. This isn’t a coincedence. This does’t mean though, that colleges would reject one amazing candidate just because they have filled the quotum, but this does imply they probably have some guidelines. This is just conjecture though.</p>
<p>@Yodastreet: Thank you! You should read the whole article if you haven’t yet: It is really interesting!</p>
<p>Just did this for my own interest, thought I might as well post it.</p>
<p>They begin reading applications on Dec. 1, and decision come around April 1. Not counting weekends, holidays, etc., there are about 70ish work days in that time period. (I don’t believe they work on weekends? Correct me if I’m wrong.)</p>
<p>So 30,000 divided by 70 is about 428 applications a day. I’m going to make an estimate of about 20 application readers on the Harvard admission staff? So that means about 21 applications a day. Figure a ten hour workday, and I come up with about 2 applications an hour; half an hour per application. Obviously there are second readings of some applications and factors like that. But really, a whole 30 minutes on one application is not that bad considering the large volume.</p>
<p>Harvard has more money than many countries, and they have a huge staff.</p>
<p>^
sad but true. harvard can be its own country and still do well.</p>
<p>I read that the average admissions officer (for any school) spends 7-8 minutes on an application.</p>