<p>Somebody has probably already thought of this, but doesn't it seem like UVa's decisions are a bit later than most other colleges with early acceptance plans? </p>
<p>They are taking three months (Beginning of November to end of January) to read all of their early applications, about 11,000.</p>
<p>Yet all previous years they have completed about double that amount (~22,000) in the same amount of time, three months (Beginning of January to End of March).</p>
<p>So if they only have half of the applications, shouldn't they be done a bit quicker than 3 full months?</p>
<p>We have a much smaller staff than our peers. We have one peer with double the staff. We have another that hires 60 readers to help them read. I know others that do preliminary reviews based on academic stats to determine what files are fully read.</p>
<p>We don’t do that. We have a small staff that reads every single file in a thorough, complete manner. We take prose notes. We don’t have a rubric or assign scores to components of the application. We believe this is how to give each file full consideration and catch cases were grading scales or GPA methodologies are a little wonky.</p>
<p>Would the results be the same if we rushed or did a simpler, objective review? For many, yes. But there are so many cases where the subjective components have a significant influence on the decision.</p>
<p>One last thing. RD applications start arriving in October. We don’t start reading after deadline. We read when applications are complete. The reading season before EA was not just three months.</p>