According to my school (which is in China-- I don’t know if that matters), students in previous years who got into their ED choice (Columbia, Penn, Duke, etc.) who also applied to UChicago EA were rejected/deferred by UChicago? Is it a coincidence or do admissions officers talk? What do you guys think?
Where did you get this from? I personally know a friend that was admitted EA to U Chicago and ED to Dartmouth
Don’t think admissions officers talk about that particular thing. I think your information is anectodal.
How would UChicago find out where else you’re applying? They wouldn’t.
Perhaps those students showed in their supplements that they weren’t that excited to go UChicago.
Yep, I agree with @anxiousenior1 – UChicago cares a lot about fit. It’s more likely they just weren’t a match in that sense.
anxioussenior1’s comment makes sense. The Chicago essays were demanding and DS spent a lot of time on them.
Yeah this is all anecdotal but patterns year after year don’t lie. According to the students I spoke with who got into Columbia and Penn, they actually prioritized UChicago essays and the fit was clearly there. My school will wait and see if this holds true again this year.
ED acceptance rates are by far higher than those for EA, so you would expect to see more ED admits than EA admits. Furthermore, the admissions standards for ED admits tend to be less rigorous than for EA admits, so it is entirely plausible that students who get into an ED program may not get into UChicago’s EA. There is obviously no crosstalk between admissions departments, ruling out the possibility of causal inference.
How many students who applied EA to UChicago, without applying ED anywhere else, were accepted? I do not believe that there is any force at play preventing ED admits in China from being accepted to UChicago EA, but given that you claim to have a good sample size, it would be interesting to do a statistical analysis of whether the EA admit rate of the population of students that applied both EA and ED is significantly different from the EA admit rate of the population that applied solely EA.
Since UChicago is EA and not SCEA or ED they expect that every student applies elsewhere.