<p>Hi guys!</p>
<p>If you apply for a certain school for early decision, but get deferred into the regular decision pool of applicants, would your chances be lower than the other regular decision applicants (since college admissioners would probably be fed up of seeing your application again and again)?</p>
<p>Statistically speaking, you might have a lower change. ED provides a marginally higher acceptance rate, usually. I think ‘fed up with’ your application is a stretch. If they knew you didn’t have what it takes, they’d just outright reject you. Hell with the thousands of applications schools receive, theres a good chance they’d forget they read it already.</p>
<p>It may depend on the school. U of Chicago deferred thousands of applicants from their EA pool last year that they clearly had no plan to accept. But not all schools do that.</p>
<p>If you get deferred, let the admissions office know you are still really interested in the school. If you have any accomplishments that happen between your initial ED or EA application and say, February, send an email to admissions and let them know about it.</p>
<p>I don’t think you can really draw any reliable inference from a deferral, except that you’re still in the game.</p>
<p>Northwestern does not defer. If you don’t get in you are rejected. </p>
<p>It depends on the school you apply to early</p>
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<p>Actually, that’s not true. They’ve have had a look at your application and found it lacking. You are less likely to get in after a deferral than if you applied RD. That is an inference that you can get from a deferral.</p>
<p>^I think thats debatable as well. If it were really lacking so much, why not just reject them?</p>
<p>I feel deferrals have a lot to do with the pool and the needs/diversity a college is trying to meet. Say someone brings something unique to the table during the early pool–oboe, for the cliche example. The school needs an oboe player, but maybe this oboe player doesn’t have the strongest academics. They might defer this person, and see if any oboe players with stronger academic records appear in the regular round. If they don’t, then he/she might get accepted. If they do, probably not. It doesn’t have to be an instrument, obviously, and may be something like geographic diversity, race, etc. Also I think the same idea applies to waitlisted applicants (although more to do with needs than diversity at this point)</p>
<p>You start out with an X% chance to get in. Some of that X%, say Xe% comes from the early round, and some, say Xr% comes from the RD round. Xe + Xr = X</p>
<p>They look at your application and defer you. Now your chances are Xr < X. Your chances must go down after a deferral.</p>
<p>It doesn’t mean that you can’t get in, but your chances HAVE to be lower.</p>
<p>Thank you, Etuck, for saving me the trouble.</p>
<p>IMO, if there’s any inference you can draw from a deferral, it’s that they’d like more information. Maybe it’s about the applicant; maybe they want to see first-semester grades from senior year. Maybe it’s about the strength of this year’s RD applicant pool; maybe they want to see how the applicant will stack up against the competition.</p>
<p>But I would not be confident concluding any more than that from a deferral.</p>
<p>Google “Monte Hall Problem”. </p>
<p>A door with a goat has been opened with that deferral.</p>
<p>The conditions of the Monty Hall Problem do not apply to college admissions.</p>
<p>They have to. A deferral must lower your chances. It’s relevant information that you didn’t have before. Otherwise, you had an a priori chance of zero (Xe=0) to get in early.</p>
<p>You’re going to have to explain that to me. I can’t see how anything about the Monty Hall Problem applies.</p>
<p>The applicant isn’t making a choice without knowledge. The applicant isn’t making a choice at all.</p>
<p>There’s no knowledgeable participant–no Monty Hall–deliberately revealing an undesirable outcome.</p>
<p>In the Monty Hall Problem, all the “zonk” probability transfers to the other door because there is no other place for it to go. The Regular Decision round brings in thousands of new applicants. Those applicants, however, aren’t unknowns to the admissions committee. They get to read the files. They’re not just guessing about admit/deny decisions. The RD applicants’ qualifications are an unknown to the deferred applicant, but that’s not really important because the applicant isn’t making any selection or decision.</p>
<p>I seriously cannot think of a single way in which the logic of the Monty Hall Problem applies.</p>
<p>You start out with certain knowledge and you have a certain probability of a certain outcome. Each possible finite grain outcome has a certain probability. One finest grain outcome is getting in early, another is getting rejected early and getting in regular, another is getting rejected by both. The sum of the probabilities of the 3 finest grain events must equal 1. </p>
<p>In the Monte Hall problem, all three doors start out with a prior probability of 1/3. </p>
<p>Now something happens. In Monte Hall, you choose a door and the host opens a different door with a goat, in college admissions, you get deferred. </p>
<p>These events give you information. In Monte Hall, the probability of the door you picked having a car is still 1/3, but the probability of the other unopened door having a car is now 2/3 because you know that the third door has a goat. </p>
<p>In college admissions, the probability of getting admitted is the sum of the probability of getting admitted early and the probability of getting admitted regular. The probability of getting rejected is the rest. Now you find out that you got deferred. The probability of getting rejected now has a larger fraction of the remaining probability. It has to. This means that you are more likely to get rejected than you were before you applied early. </p>
<p>Getting information changes your probabilities.</p>
<p>No, I don’t think the probability of being admitted early, the probability of being admitted regular, and the probability of being denied sum to 1. They might if the decisions were all made under the same set of circumstances. But they’re not made under the same circumstances. The RD decisions are made with more information about the applicant (e.g., first-semester grades, and perhaps higher SAT or ACT scores or additional accomplishments in sports or the arts), and they’re made with a whole new set of applicants against whom the deferred applicant is being benchmarked.</p>
<p>I’m not buying your argument, CRD.</p>
<p>You’re looking at it from the point of view of the admissions committee. I’m looking at it from the point of view of the applicant, who can’t know anything about the other applicants. All the applicant knows is that the committee has taken a look at his/her application and while it could have admitted him/her, it didn’t. The applicant is the one who has to assess their chances and make decisions based on that chance. It has to go down.</p>
<p>You mean, I’m looking at it from the perspective of the people who are actually making the decision! (Which is what’s happening in the Monty Hall problem. That problem looks very different from Monty’s perspective. Monty’s chances of choosing the car are basically 1/1.) </p>
<p>Since the applicant isn’t actually making the decision, why on earth does it matter what it looks like from the applicant’s perspective? That’s more like [Blind</a> men and an elephant - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant]Blind”>Blind men and an elephant - Wikipedia).</p>