On the UChicago website, they list the admissions officers by region, indicating one officer for each portion in a state. Does this mean that only one pair of eyes eventually scans your essays and entire application?
I was under the impression that almost all the officers get to review an applicant and give their individual opinions.
I don’t think that is right. I think an application may be read by at most two readers, with each one marking their ultimate decision. If they disagree, the application goes to a committee. I read somewhere that at Stanford, only legacy apps get two readers, all others only get one.
Do the math. UChic gets more than 27,000 applications every year. If each person on the AdComm spends just 5 minutes reading each application, it will take each of them 2200+ hours just to read all the applications- the guts of a 100 days! As @VeryLuckyParent noted, In most selective universities only borderline or problematic applications go to committee- and even then typically the regional AO summarizes the application.
@collegemom3717 That is one of the more significant observations I have seen on this site. I always recognized that the first screening would be done by one person with applicants put in pools recommending accept, reject, or maybe. I think it unlikely that a school would accept without a second reading by someone, but your math makes it very understandable that the reject pool could be a decision by a single person. And that makes it all the more understandable that an application could be treated so differently by two or three schools. Individual opinions can be expected to show far greater variance than a consensus committee opinion.
My understanding, based on information that could be out of date by now, is that every application gets read initially by two readers, one of whom is one of the full-time admissions staff assigned to the applicant’s region and the other of whom may be another admissions staffer (including someone senior), but also may be a part-time person – one of the student aides at the admissions office, or recent graduates. There is a scoring system under which various attributes of the application are scored separately, and a process for an additional reading if there are significant differences between the two readers’ scores. After that process, a number applicants are accepted (those with the highest overall scores), and most are rejected, based on not being in the top x% in any of the separate scores or in an aggregate overall score. There is probably a separate consideration or standard for recruited athletes and development candidates, and probably some additional consideration (but not really a separate standard) for legacies as well. After that, there is a more nuanced process in which more people read each application or part of it. Ultimately, a pretty large number of decisions between acceptance and waitlist are made by the full staff, with the applicable regional staffperson presenting the case and everyone voting. At that point, potentially all of them will have at least looked at a summary of the application, and maybe read critical portions as well.