<p>It seems to me that there is a great advantage to send your application to a school at least a few week in advance of when it is due. It would show forethought, planning and a desire to attend the school. Other advantages would be that it would get read/decided upon in a less rushed manner.</p>
<p>It also might have the same effect on your school's guidance office.</p>
<p>Only caveat is that you might not know all your scores before the application date.</p>
<p>This came to mind because an international friend of my daughter's did not get accepted to Brown this year. When he called the school they said that they really liked him, but they had already filled up their quota for international Engligh-speaking men for the year.</p>
<p>A great advantage? C’mon. They spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to cull the best possible applicant pool. To imagine a huge disparity of admissions results based upon the order of when a file is read (which is dependent upon when the file is complete: i.e. all the scores and school reports get sent – not when the student sends his/her application) – is difficult to imagine.</p>
<p>Also the line about “quota” seems like an excuse to me. No one involved in admissions would ever say such an asinine thing. More likely, the admissions officer complimented him and told him that among the thousands of impressive applicants this year, especially from Internationals, that it was very difficult for them to choose (which is the truth). However, to say that HE specifically was left off because he missed the quota is just a stretch of the truth.</p>
<p>I’ve been told by a few admissions officers that at schools with rolling admissions, if your stats are mid-range or borderline for the school, your chances for admission are higher if you apply very early. Many rolling admissions schools will accept certain stats early in the admissions cycle that they wouldn’t later on. </p>
<p>However, if your scores still aren’t high enough, and there’s time to retake tests, these schools will usually wait and let you submit later scores for consideration before they will outright reject you. In other words, if you apply very early (say in August/Sept) and your scores are still too low for them to accept you, they will often contact you and say that they are deferring admission. This gives such a student another chance to test again and send better scores.</p>
<p>For rolling schools - yes- send in your app early - October or November. For colleges that have a deadline - there is no point to sending it in extremely early. Say the college deadline for early action is November 10th - and you send yours in October. It is not going to be read early. The admissions staff are out on the road - visiting high schools. They are not in their office reading apps until November. So, rushing to get it in super early serves no purpose.</p>
<p>That being said, don’t wait until the last minute either. I get frustrated with kids who wait until the night before to submit online - and then have problems with the site crashing, etc. How about aiming for a week before the deadline?</p>
<p>For schools which offer rolling admission, sending in application early is helpful, but other than those schools, I don’t see much advantage by doing that.</p>
<p>Agreed about the rolling admissions advantage: I sent in my app two weeks before the deadline, when all my friends applied, and heard back 2-3 months earlier than any of them. But I don’t see what difference it makes for highly selective deadline schools- plenty of people get in who turn apps in the night before.</p>