<p>On some graduate school application, there's a section asking "Have you previously applied to our school?" Then, we have to select which year and which level (freshman, transfer, grad student) we have previously applied.</p>
<p>Why do they ask this? Does this mean that if we have been rejected before as a college freshman, our chances to be admitted to grad school might be jeopardized?</p>
<p>So that they can look at your previous records and get a more comprehensive picture of you and your development.</p>
<p>They probably ask because you would already have an internal identifier if you had applied in the past, and they don’t want to create a duplicate record for you because that can lead to all sorts of complications (e.g. you might end up with two incomplete application files). Some graduate schools allow applicants to “reactivate” a recent application then you could reuse some of the previous submissions (e.g. GRE scores, transcripts, some of your letters of recommendation).</p>
<p>The graduate admissions committee (faculty members from the department you are applying to, not a university-wide committee) most certainly won’t get to read your high school letters of recommendation (nor would they want to - reading 3x300 college letters is tiring enough as it is) and they couldn’t care less about whether or not you were rejected from that university four years ago.</p>
<p>The identifier of grade is probably there because the form is used by all levels of admission (undergraduate, graduate, and post-bacc), so it’s probably a artifact from programming.</p>
<p>I know for graduate school, if your application was rejected last year and you did nothing to improve it this year, you’ll like be rejected. Having past records as a lag, an admissions officer can see what you’ve done in the course of about a year and take that under more rigorous consideration than your overall profile. For some, this is good, but for others (who haven’t done anything productive in a year) this may be bad.</p>
<p>If you have a mediocre profile, but you’ve demonstrated potential for research (published or presented some papers this past year, retaken the GRE, research experience, etc.), that can signal an upwards trend before graduate school, boding well with professors.</p>
<p>Do PhD programs encourage or discourage applicants from applying more than once assuming their undergraduate record improves?</p>
<p>I also want to know.</p>