I was just wondering: if I literally decide to Early Decision to Duke like a week before the deadline, is that okay?
I just wanted to make sure there weren’t any specific forms or anything that need to be filled out like a month before. Please PLEASE let me know asap! Deadline is quickly approaching.
Thank you so much!
Amberlanya.
Looks like everything is due November 1st - but that means teacher recs and counselor input so make sure they know you are applying somewhere with an early application due date.
Remember that the higher Early Decision acceptance rate of 18% (7.3% Regular Decision) or 882 accepted includes the following “hooked” applicants:
100+ recruited athletes
400 “people of color” (URM)
32 Questbridge students
52 International students
584/882 = 66% of ED acceptances had a “hook”. A good guess is that if you are an “unhooked” applicant, your chances of getting into Duke ED is around 9%, only slightly better than RD.
It’s not the great benefit that the college tries to sell you or any other applicant.
Most colleges tell you what you need to supply, right on their web pages.
While I agree with your conclusion, the numbers are of course imprecise, particularly because I expect the majority of the 400 minority ED acceptances are for Asian applicants, not URMs. And don’t forget legacy/development admits, which are often ED. (Development admits have gone down dramatically, but still exist to an extent. And Legacy applicants are often more qualified on average anyways.)
Athletes aren’t all ED because they don’t have to be. Many are still making their decisions in Nov and aren’t ready to commit
Duke has more than 100 recruited athletes (probably around 160?) but for the ones committed by 12/15 it looks like they account for them in ED acceptance rate per the discussion my D20 and I had with the Dean of Admissions (Mr. Guttentag).
@bluedog He also used the term “People of Color” being 45% in ED, which I interpret that as Hispanic, African American, American Indian, but not Asian. I could be wrong?
In addition, I did not factor the legacy/development admits in my simple analysis because there might be overlaps such as a recruited athlete was also a legacy, etc.
With that said, the one important concept I did not factor in is about 903 ED applicants are “deferred” and get another chance for possible acceptance in RD. Somewhere around 99 applicants in that group ultimately got accepted or 11%.
So maybe ED gives the “unhooked” applicant a slightly better chance at acceptance than RD when you factor in the deferred aspect but it’s nowhere close to the 18% often proudly cited by the university.
Thank you!
Yep, you’re wrong. (Which isn’t a big deal, but just telling you the truth. 
) This statistic includes those of Asian descent. Again, though, I agree with your conclusions.
During one Dean Guttentag’s visits, we actually walked through a sample application and how they evaluate it. This applicant (with all personally identifiable information scrubbed) was a valedictorian with high SAT scores that ultimately was waitlisted. The conclusion was basically they were a perfectly good candidate and highly qualified, but there simply were other candidates that stood out more. The passions didn’t fully come through in the application. This exercise demonstrated the “randomness” of it all, which Guttentag even somewhat acknowledged. It’s an art, not a science.