It is all of that, looking forward, assessed in a quick glance at the application for the vast majority of applicants. Since Purdue is college in the OP, I looked at their numbers. 53k applications. Assuming 20 readers (That is probably more staff than they have) and 12 weeks to review them (again probably too much time), then each reviewer needs to complete more than 220 applications per day, or about 6 per hour assuming no breaks, lunch, meetings, or distractions, for 8 hours a day. While I am sure they would love to ponder each application, the workload just doesn’t permit it. Many schools get more applications than 53k as well.