If I were an admission officer and somehow I know all the applicants’ activities on my school’s website (which is not very difficult, technically speaking), I could guess to some extent that whether a specific applicant does care about the school.
For example, if a clearly over-qualified applicant frequently login to check status and notifications, it’s not very likely that he just applies the school for safety; if an applicant didn’t even visit the homepage of the major he claims that he is interested in, then his essay may not be written by himself. etc, etc.
It does sound like thing that specific schools would do.
I’d be surprised if they went to that level of details. IMO it sounds almost like stalking the applicants. Plus it would be easy to show a kind of fake interest – it would be just take a second for an applicant to log in daily to a school he/she actually cares little about.
Yes, especially at smaller schools and schools with yield issues. They can, and often they do. Big data/data mining/data analytics/ enrollment management has gone to bigger and better tools just like this.
Reports of such activity can be generated and inserted into an applicant’s file automatically. An admissions officer simply has to glance in the right direction.
My D has applied to a bunch of LACs and checks her portals for them once a week or so, for,this very reason. Also, another prolific poster on CC said that you should open emails and download pictures, as apparently they can tell if you looked at the email, or something like that.
Yes, when reading email from the college, be sure to view the images so that your downloading of the images will be tracked as “interest” (reading it with images blocked or in a text-only email reader will not result in such “interest” being tracked).
LOL. I personally hate fishing but hey whatever works. So it looks even more impressive because they are first generation fishing instructors since their mother does not know how.
